The Dead

About 44,000 Americans will die this year because they lack health care. My sister, Shannon Goss, is one of them. She died in February. She was 15 years my junior.

The arguments against providing government health care to the poor strike me as nonsensical. We know that it works in Europe. We know that it saves money. We know that people who have single payer like it. The arguments that government health care doesn't work, that it costs more and that people hate it have proved so false that we seldom hear them repeated now, except from Senator Lieberman, who has lost his mind. At the moment the main health care argument seems to be about religious positions on abortion.

One real problem, of course, is that the health insurance industry's huge profits might be cut back a little by the current bills in congress. Industrial greed is the motive for the massive media campaign. The Republican Party will hitch its broken wagon to any protest group with legs. But why are so many ordinary Americans frantically opposing health care for the poor? My guess is that they have their eyes on the future.

Albert Camus broke with Sartre and the French existentialists because they supported Stalin, who was murdering millions of people on the grounds that it would help working class people some time in the future. Camus' position was that you don't murder people in the name of an unforeseeable future, whether your goal is a workers' paradise, a seat in Heaven or a Christian nation in which businesses are totally unregulated--this last seems to be the genuine aim of the teabaggers.

That pipe dream is unworthy of 44,000 deaths per year, especially when the future seems to include rampant global warming and its impact on business. We are looking at total folly.