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?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.
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)
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.
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.”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.
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.