It's not that I want this column to become The Washington Post Light (little pun there), but, as a matter of fact, I begin writing first thing in the morning after prayer, breakfast and paper. It's impossible not to have the morning's news spinning around in the hamster wheels in my mind. First, a front-page article that spelled out some of the fall-out from the credit collapse on the neediest Americans disturbed me. That was followed up by an enlightening "Federal Diary" article by columnist Stephen Barr on a report issued by the IBM Center for the Business of Government. I particularly enjoy Barr's column because he is always balanced and never gets emotionally carried away in his commentary.
The 'top ten' list that the IBM Center has recently published highlights what these experts consider the biggest challenges confronting the US government in the next few years: a critical judgment as 'regime change' looms large on our political horizon. As a person who's married to government contractor, I have the remarkable gift of being able to see the wisdom of the IBM Center's 'top ten' list from the inside. Let me tell you that, from where I sit, they're right on the mark!
There are serious challenges to our future as a nation that are spelled out in this report. The one that I'd like to focus on today is actually the first one on the IBM list (I'm going to assume that they spelled them out in a particular order). Here's the actual page from their report:
It's the first paragraph in particular that should grab our attention: for the IBM Center, 'fiscal sanity' means addressing 'health care and retirement costs.' Tragically, the reality goes far beyond just fiscal sanity.
Although the article cites "rising health costs are pushing state and local budgets into crisis," the truth is that our cultural decision to sacrifice the individual to bottom line has pushed us ever closer to becoming a genocidal nation. The nation was in turmoil when Terri Schaivo's doctors (supported by her husband) wanted to terminate her life support. Yet there's hardly a whisper when, one by one, states are pulling the plug on those whose lives depend on expensive medications by ending their drug subsidies in a misguided effort to reduce health care costs.
As a culture, I think we have a weird concept of reality. The same inhuman phenomena appear predictably whenever entrepreneurs turn their businesses over to the Bean Counters. Individual welfare gets sacrificed to the bottom line. The aged and chronically ill are abandoned and left to die [aids patients are unable to afford life-sustaining medications in California]. Severely injured people have the money they depend on for continuing care wiped out by multi-national corporations [Wal-Mart sued brain-injured Debbie Shrank for the $414,00 she gained in an accident settlement and won].
I've often quoted Hubert Humphrey (paraphrasing Dostoevsky), who said, "The moral test of a government is how it treats those who are at the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the aged; and those who are in the shadow of life, the sick and the needy, and the handicapped." It's past time for us as a society to step down from our self-styled moral high horse and realize the damage that our social and economic theories are doing. What, after all, is the dollar value of a single human life?
H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown
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understanding, bean counters, inhumanity, health care, cost cutting
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