Health care will stir up the November election

Editor,

With the century’s most historic piece of legislation under exam in the highest court of the land, and the burning question of what is creating new jobs and whether they are actually being created at all, America’s political climate appears about as uncertain as Newt Gingrich’s candidacy.

Wait, scratch the last part. One thing is for sure: the Tea Party movement, in all its hysteria, will be watching the general election very closely.

I, for one, refuse to jump on the knee-jerk liberal bandwagon by assuming that tea partiers are uncultured, angry loons. The benefit of the doubt is an important feature of character. Beyond the few extreme examples — I’m looking at you, bumper-sticker maker from Georgia — the movement consists of hard-working, well-meaning, patriotic Americans who feel a lack of political control and long for some Jeffersonian version of their country to return.

Whether such a paradise was actually so clear-cut seems to pale in importance. What I don’t understand, however, is how one could follow a movement with so many ideological flaws that its entire philosophy cannot stand in lieu of its own boisterous rhetoric.

Here, we have a movement that claims it wants to free the American populace from the shackles of big government primarily by relieving the American consumers, particularly the ones of modest means, from the “unconstitutionality” of a more inclusive health care system.

Never mind that the United States remains the only advanced democratic nation that persistently refuses to provide a health care plan for its own people. Never mind that none of these countries with nationalized health care have abandoned the capitalist system, as the Tea Party movement so apocalyptically says the U.S. will do. What, then, could it be said is the source of all the Tea Party’s problems?

Poor people who cannot pay their medical expenses on their own and everyone and anyone in office who thinks such conditions are unacceptable. For shame.

Amid the near certainty that Mitt Romney will win the GOP nomination, the same demographic has denounced him as some kind of liberal hiding behind the party elephant. And why is that?

He has recognized the impending need for the country to re-examine its health policy. And you can bet this faction of the party will push him rightward as we approach November. But wherever you stand, one thing is clear: the American public is suffering.

America is a nation in economic turmoil, where no one is quite certain whether they will keep their jobs or get one in the first place, where the state of higher education is in limbo at best and where humane health care lays in the balance of the gavel.

Perplexingly, it is also a society where an opposition movement espouses protectionism in the midst of a competitive global market, and the cutting of government services in an economy where personal consumption is paramount to growth. All while standing in protest on, yes, government-owned roads, exercising their rights which only the federal system can protect. I would be writing screenplays in California as we speak if I could make this stuff up.

I believe that most of us, whatever party we identify with, want the American people to heal from this Great Recession. But in doing so, too many are forgetting the importance of re-evaluating the effects of certain domestic policies. The otherwise level-headed people mentioned should not be so afraid to jump on board in such efforts.

Jeremiah Wall
UNM Student