Their spirit is dead
by Tom Sullivan
Access to health care, debate over privatizing public education, deepening xenophobia, inaction on climate change, and decline of civic pride in people’s mad scramble to cover their own asses reminded me of this famous movie exchange:
Mr. Trask : Are you finished, Mr. Slade?
Lt. Col. Frank Slade : No, I’m just gettin’ warmed up. I don’t know who went to this place, William Howard Taft, William Jennings Bryan, William Tell, whoever. Their spirit is dead, if they ever had one. It’s gone.
— Scent of a Woman (1992)
Fairfax Community Hospital faces closure. Ninety minutes outside Tulsa, OK, the small rural facility is out of funds. What staff remains works for free. Bills go unpaid. Supplies are running thin.
The situation is familiar across the country. In rural communities such as Belhaven, NC, where Vidant Health closed Pungo Hospital on July 1, 2014, the sick and injured must now travel over an hour, if not hours, to find care. If they live that long.
The Washington Post reports:
More than 100 of the country’s remote hospitals have gone broke and then closed in the past decade, turning some of the most impoverished parts of the United States into what experts now call “health-hazard zones,” and Fairfax was on the verge of becoming the latest. The emergency room was down to its final four tanks of oxygen. The nursing staff was out of basic supplies such as snakebite antivenin and strep tests. Hospital employees had not received paychecks for the past 11 weeks and counting.
This is what a for-profit health care system looks like to Americans who inhabit vast stretches of rural America. Do they feel abandoned? They have reason to:
In the past decade, emergency room visits to America’s more than 2,000 rural hospitals increased by more than 60 percent, even as those hospitals began to collapse under doctor shortages and historically low operating margins. Hospitals like Fairfax Community treat patients that are on average six years older and 40 percent poorer than those in urban hospitals, which means rural hospitals have suffered disproportionately from government cuts to Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement rates. They also treat a higher percentage of uninsured patients, resulting in unpaid bills and rising debts. A record 46 percent of rural hospitals lost money last year. More than 400 are classified by health officials as being at “high risk of imminent failure.” Hundreds more have cut services or turned over control to outside ownership groups in an attempt to stave off closure.
In a country as rich as ours, it need not be this way. Shyteria Shardae “Shy” Shoemaker, 23, of Chickasaw County, MS need not have died. Nor Patricia “Po” Swindell of Hyde County, NC. Leaving Americans’ lives to the gentle mercies of the marketplace is a choice we, all of us, have made. Profit trumps people. Profit trumps community. Profit trumps pride.
Drafters of the Constitution imagined a country that provided not just for an army and a navy, but for universal postal service. Members of the Midas cult do not yet demand the military pay its own way: profit or perish. Profits from production of weaponry spread out across enough states and congressional districts to make that demand a political nonstarter. Cultists demand, however, the United States Postal Service turn a profit or turn itself over to private, for-profit competitors that do.
Same, too, with public schools. Cultists’ push to charterize, voucherize, or tax-credit scholarship public education out of existence — supported by a religious right profiteers have co-opted — is a betrayal of the country’s founding vision. Public education is the largest portion of annual budgets in all 50 states. The cult sees public schools (and children) as resources to strip-mine.
In the late 18th century, this tiny, backwater nation had defeated the world’s premiere military power. It had big dreams. It would push west, as David McCollough chronicles in his recent book, “The Pioneers.”
Andrew C. Isenberg, professor of history at the University of Kansas, takes McCollough to task for photoshopping the blemishes of pioneers who settled the Northwest Territories. “The fortitude of the settlers McCullough describes was quite real,” Isenberg writes. “So too was land fraud, racial hierarchy and the ousting of Native Americans from their homes.”
Granted. But as I have noted, the Northwest Ordinances that enabled creation of Midwest states imagined a country with greater civic pride than the one that exists today:
John Adams (a tea party favorite) wrote in 1785, “The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”
To that purpose, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (passed under the Articles of Confederation prior to ratification of the U.S. Constitution) called for new states formed from what is now the American Midwest to encourage “schools and the means of education,” and the Enabling Act of 1802 signed by President Thomas Jefferson … required — as a condition of statehood — the establishment of schools and public roads, funded in part by the sale of public lands. Enabling acts for later states followed the 1802 template, establishing permanent funds for public schools, federal lands for state buildings, state universities and public works projects (canals, irrigation, etc.), and are reflected in state constitutions from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
That spirit is dead. An anachronism. The Midas cult believes that America leaves too much unplundered. Cultists, too, stand in the way of this country’s citizens (including unprofitable rural ones) from enjoying health protection as comprehensive as that provided by the not-for-profit military. People want that no matter how much it costs. But providing universal, publicly funded health care is anathema. It will cost money.
Saving the planet will cost money, too, Bill Nye explains.