FROM A DISTANCE

                 The song says “God is watching Us, God is watching Us, God is watching Us from a distance.” One has to wonder how far a distance that is. Last week a former student walked into a Florida High school and shot 17 students and teachers dead. He wounded many others. Every few weeks we hear of other mass shootings. It is upsetting and depressing. We turn to the news on television and hear that people are dying in the fight against ISIS and other splinter groups that believe it is God’s will that they murder unbelievers.                      Whether God is watching us or not, he is certainly not doing his job. Neither, for that matter, are Jesus, Mary, the Saints, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Shiva, Buddha, Zoroaster, Mohammed, George Clooney or Tom Brady. The world is racked with suffering. We need a new God who will alleviate the suffering and evil in the world. Where do we get one? Do we advertize in the newspaper? Is there anybody out there capable of doing God’s job? All of the religions worship God as a perfect being. He/She is omnipotent, omniscient, loving, caring, good, kind, and okay. Should we worship and love this God? Could that be said of this God who lets a wacko kid go in and shoot-up a high school killing seventeen kids? In the past I have written about whether we should thank and love God. Here is what I wrote:

Consider the following: The great majority of people in the world live in abject poverty. Most of those people suffer from hunger, disease, famine, tsunamis, cyclones, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcanoes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, plagues, infestations, and war. When one looks at the continents of Africa, Asia, and South America, one wonders how there could be a loving God looking over those people. Hundreds of millions of the people on those continents are subjected to widespread diseases such as cholera, malaria, sleeping sickness, AIDS, Dengue Fever, and Yellow Fever. They have insufficient clothing, shelter, and medical care. They are ruled-over by tyrants and dictators.

Millions of women throughout the world are treated as chattels without civil rights. They are beaten, raped, stoned, and subject to genital castration designed to eradicate their sexual pleasure. It is hard to imagine that such people are happy.

Hundreds of thousands of women, young girls, and boys are abducted each year by sex-crazed men who imprison and often torture them, using them as sexual toys for repeated rape, and ultimately murder them. Many thousands of them are sold into sexual slavery, often to be bought by so-called upstanding members of the community.

What about the lucky people in America and the more affluent countries of Europe? One would think that they have many reasons to thank God. But we need to ask, are the lives of Americans so blessed and happy? Let’s start with health. Practically everybody in America has somebody in their family suffering from some serious illness. Millions of Americans have children with serious congenital diseases and infirmities such as autism, blindness, deafness, physical deformity, Down Syndrome, mental retardation, mental illnesses, muscular dystrophy, diabetes, epilepsy, cystic fibrosis, heart disease, cancer, and hundreds of other less common syndromes and disorders. The parents of such children often live lives of great sorrow.

Millions of adult Americans also suffer from terrible diseases. Heart disease, cancer, kidney disease, liver disease, Emphysema, Parkinson’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS), AIDS, Crohn’s Disease, chronic pain, and hundreds of other conditions beset the happiness of their lives. Millions of Americans suffer from mental problems, depression, anxiety, fatigue, loneliness, phobias, panic attacks, disabling shyness, and stress throughout their lives. Millions of Americans suffer from the effects of terrible automobile accidents and other injuries. They go through life as cripples with disabled or missing limbs, daamaged internal organs, and other essential parts of their bodies.

As people get older, they greet a host of problems afflicting older Americans such as strokes, heart disease, arthritis, diabetes, hearing and seeing defects, prostate problems, osteoporosis, erectile dysfunction, sleep disorders, Alzheimer’s and dementia, and hundreds of other medical and psychological problems that impair their happiness. As people age their bodies breaks-down, their skin wrinkles, their hair disappears, their energy fails, and they lose their sexual ability and attraction.

Millions of Americans are addicted to alcohol and illegal drugs. Many of them are living in terrible misery, unable to shake the imprisonment of their addictions. There are millions of homeless people living on the streets, in tents, under bridges, and in shelters. Millions of other Americans are addicted to behavior patterns such as gambling, fetishism, sexual addiction, frigidity, obsessive-compulsive behavior, dependency, and other forms of addiction.

There are millions of people with sexual deviations including the need to molest children or rape women. Millions of people engage in abusive behavior, physically beating or verbally berating their spouses, companions, and children. Millions of spouses, companions, and children are victims of such abuse. Such people cannot possibly be happy.

Millions of Americans live in poverty surrounded by a land of plenty. They eke-out a living in slums, tenements, housing projects, trailer parks, and rural shacks. They often go hungry in this land of plenty. Many go without decent clothing, shelter, ordinary medical care. Many live in places without heat, cooling, electricity, telephone service, computers, sanitation, or even running water.

Millions of Americans are the victims of discrimination. People of all minorities suffer from bigotry. Millions of homosexuals, transvestites, transsexuals, and other trans-gender people are the objects of prejudice and condemnation by millions of other people.

Every day one reads in the paper about people who commit crimes. There are thousands of kinds of crimes committed every day by millions of people. It is difficult to guess what percent of the populace is dishonest, violent, dangerous, fraudulent, and deceitful, but judging from the constant news of crimes, schemes, scams, and corruptions, the number must run well into the tens of millions. There are millions of people engaged in serious and not-so-serious crime, including robbery, larceny, drug offenses, burglary, mugging, assault and battery, murder, and thousands of other kinds of crime. One constantly hears about violent massacres by crazed gunmen in schools, theaters, and public places. In addition to the victims of such killings, the families, friends, and communities of the victims are also victims. Millions of Americans are incarcerated in prisons and jails. There are millions of wives, children, parents, and other close relatives of prison inmates. These people must suffer having their loved ones in jail. There are millions of victims of crimes whose lives have been ruined by the crimes of others.

Throughout the world there are fanatic terrorists driven by religious hatred who make it their business to kill others who do not share their beliefs. I cannot imagine how many people are killed each year by these zealots but it must be in the thousands. It seems that every day one reads about a bomb going off in the Middle East or some other place, killing innocent people. The fanatics of ISIS feel compelled by their hate to murder and behead their enemies. If we consider the minds of the terrorists, they must be angry, tormented, unhappy people who have a lust for blood.

Millions of Americans are in unhappy marriages or relationships. Millions of Americans are suffering from the breakdown of their marriages or the breakup of relationships in which they were very much in love. Half of all marriages end in divorce. A majority of those who do not get divorced go on living in unhappy marriages. Millions of people are engaged in illicit sexual entanglements that cause them emotional pain and guilt. Millions of people are almost suicidal because of the infidelity of a spouse or loved one. Millions of people suffer from feelings of inferiority or lack of self-worth. Millions of people suffer from the feeling that they are too fat, too thin, or unattractive.

Millions of Americans hate their jobs or suffer under cruel, tyrannical, or sadistic bosses. There are millions of people with sour, nasty, cruel, vicious, malicious, and evil personalities who make it their business in life to damage, spoil, and injure the lives of other people. Millions of people live lives consumed with envy, jealousy, and hatred of others whom they perceive to be more fortunate than they.

Millions of families have children with serious behavior problems. Many of these children may grow up in middle-class homes with respectable parents, yet such children are constantly in trouble with school, neighbors, the police, and others. Thousands of such children run away every year only to wind-up on the streets caught-up in drug addiction, prostitution, and crime.

For every Bernard Madoff carrying-out a giant stock swindle, there are thousands of businessmen, brokers, hedge fund managers, and others engaged in insider trading and other blatant violations of the rules of business law and ethics. Millions of Americans cheat others in smaller ways for smaller amounts of money. If one were able to calculate the amount of money embezzled from businesses, organizations, and charities each year it would probably be up in the billions if not trillions. I have known several embezzlers in my lifetime. I’m sure everybody has.

Although one would expect great probity from the wealthiest and most successful people, it is simply not there. Doctors routinely over-bill for services. I have had personal experience with dishonest doctors. One doctor who came in and handed my wife a card while our son was being treated for a broken bone at the hospital, later billed for services even though he did not examine or treat my son at all. Doctors frequently bill for services never rendered. When I was in the Hospital for back surgery, several doctors from the surgeon’s office came by and took a couple of minutes to talk to me and listen to my heart. Later they billed Medicare for hundreds of dollars for the visit. Medicare and Medicaid pay tens of billions for fraudulent claims by physicians who are wealthy by any standard.

Eventually, we die. Death is not a simple leaf dropping off a tree. Death is usually painful. Often, it is horrible. It is usually accompanied by the grief of loved ones.

While many people suffering from the terrible things listed here may not think life is bad, that is because of the human ability to cope with the things that make us unhappy. It is a wonderful thing that people going through the most extreme torments will often try to look on the bright side of life. But if we stop and look at all of the problems faced by humans and listed here, we can hardly say that life is beautiful. We can hardly find reason to thank that mythical being called God.

Surely, if there was a God, and he was a good and loving God like the one worshipped by most religions, life would not be filled with such misery. There would not be millions of starving, diseased, oppressed people in Africa and other parts of the world. There would not be so much tragedy, horror, injury, illness, poverty, hunger, anger, war, and death. We would not have to wait for some mythical afterlife to experience a better life. Life on earth would really be beautiful for everyone.

REPUBLICANS, TRUMP, AND AFRICAN AMERICANS

           The most important issue between Republicans and Democrats is and has long been the rights and treatment of African Americans.Ever since Black inhabitants of Africa were brought over here in slavery most of the white citizens have considered them an inferior race of people and have discriminated against them in every possible way. This has given rise to convulsive eruptions in the fabric of America and has polarized the attitudes of its people, particularly on a regional basis. Today, although there may be other issues that separate Liberals and Conservatives, it is the chief underlying cause of conflict between Republicans and Democrats.

            If you look at the root of many of the issues dividing Republicans and Democrats, it is the manner in which the government treats its Black citizens. Take for example healthcare. Republicans hate the Affordable Care Act (ACA) because it smacks of socialism and will increase the taxes of the richest people. But there is also the fact that the biggest beneficiaries of the ACA are African Americans. They are the poorest Americans and as such they benefit from a law that makes it easier for them to get health insurance.
         In a recent article, Kkurt Bardella, a journalist of Korean background, argued that the recent government shutdown was based on Trump's racism.

Many White conservatives think of Black people as lazy, shiftless, stupid parasites who take advantage of the system, who are supported by the government, and who do no work. They think that it is the Whites who work for a living and pay the taxes that support the Blacks. One Senator recently asked why the government should spend money on poor people when they would only use it for “alcohol, booze, and women.” I cannot express how much this attitude disgusts me.

            Conservatives will tell you that in the old days it was the Southern Democrats who were guilty of the most blatant discrimination against African Americans. At one time apartheid in America was carried-out primarily in the South where the preeminent party was the Democrats. They remember that it was Republicans like Everett Dirksen who championed the Civil Rights laws of the 1960s. They seem to forget about Richard Nixon and the “Southern Strategy.” The Southern Strategy began when Nixon and his supporters, following the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. The Board of Education, claimed that school bussing was a violation of State’s Rights and was unconstitutional. This made large numbers of Southern Democrats into Republicans while many liberal Republicans became Democrats.

            Conservatives believed that inserting African Americans into White schools would lower the level of education in the schools and impair the learning of White students. It was as if Whites, particularly in the South, thought the brown skin of African American kids would rub-off on White kids and cause them injury. Even one hundred years after the Civil War, Blacks were still thought of as pariahs.

            As a White person it is hard for me to imagine the mental anguish this bias and bigotry must have caused Black Americans. It is amazing to me that they did not engage in mass revolution against this kind of treatment. Instead, led by men like Martin Luther King, Blacks began a series of peaceful demonstrations and civil disobedience. Today, when subtle forms of bigotry continue to plague African Americans, their demonstrations against such bias are mostly nonviolent. Whites have been outraged by the act of Black football players kneeling, instead of standing, during the playing of the National Anthem. At a time when it might be argued that Blacks have a right to violently oppose the treatment they get from the police, the government, and most Whites, a few of them resort to this pitifully mild form of  protest.

Today the Republican Party seems to be returning to the old days of bias against the African American community. Donald Trump has been elected, in part, by subtly suggesting that he will not support the rights of Blacks and will cut governmental programs that benefit the poor. When White Nationalists and KKK extremists demonstrated in Charlottesville Virginia, Trump said that there were some “fine people” among them. He recently referred to largely Black countries such as Haiti and the African countries as “Shithole countries.” Trump’s supporters are clearly happy about his attitude toward African Americans. Extremist groups like the KKK have come-out strongly in support of Trump.

The North won the Civil War, but a large section of the American People today, particularly in the South, refuse to accept that outcome. They wish that African Americans were still slaves. White people disrespect Blacks every day in small ways and large. Wouldn’t it be a better America if all White people treated African Americans with respect, kindness, and love?  Wouldn’t Martin Luther King want this kind of America?

THE SEXUAL PREDATOR STORM

      The hurricane of accusations against famous men, including some much-admired figures from entertainment and politics, gives the impression that most men are hiding histories of molestation, harassment, pedophilia, or even rape. The effect this windstorm is to paint the majority of  men as brutal and bestial. I have lived for 78 years and I have never known a friend or acquaintance whom I would suspect of any such behavior.

Let us start with my father. Perhaps he was better than most men, but he was the first man I ever knew and he was as humane and decent a man as this world produces. I have tried throughout my life to pattern myself after my father, but he was too kind, loving, honest, and faithful a man to copy. I have three brothers, and each of them, in his own way, has modeled his life after my father. It is beyond human credibility to imagine that any of them would ever be a sexual predator.

Over the decades of my life as an attorney I have made many friends drawn from the law firms and professional ranks of New York, Connecticut, and Ohio. Sure I have heard locker-room talk, but never the kind admitted to by Donald Trump on Access Hollywood. No friend or acquaintance I have ever known has bragged of non-consensual sex with a woman, especially someone underage. I have never heard a friend or acquaintance speak of sexual interest in someone underage. The only such confessions I have ever heard have been by criminal defendants.

I feel a great deal of respect and admiration for those brave women who have come forward to expose the male predators who apply their power to debase and humiliate innocent female victims. Those predatory entertainers should all be fired and the politicians should resign or be impeached. Many of such men should go to jail.

It is a matter of concern, however, that some men are caught-up in the whirlwind for the most minor offenses. I am thinking particularly of former president George H.W. Bush. The minor pats, in front of his wife, by an old man in a wheelchair, should not be the cause of an outcry. His distinctive leadership of this country should earn him a little slack.

 I go back to the life of my late beloved father. He once phoned me at the office, and while talking to the receptionist he called her “Dear.” She rebuked him for using that term and told this good and gentle old man that he was a “male chauvinist pig.” My father was not used to being spoken to in this manner and was quite shaken by it. He apologized to the receptionist. The next time I saw him he was in tears speaking of the rebuke. He was not a man of the modern world, and did not understand that there were new rules of discourse. Even now that I am an old man, my heart is heavy thinking about that incident.

I feel it is important that we remember that not all men are pigs. Most men, as they struggle through this harsh world, try to behave decently. We must be careful not to let good honest men like George H.W. Bush and my father be swept-up in this tempest of accusation.

TRUMP AND CLASS

I can usually tell a Trump supporter just by looking at him. This is especially true of men. Support for and opposition to Donald Trump is based largely on social class, and social class today is based almost entirely on education. I watched a discussion on television the other day in which several Trump supporters and several Trump opponents participated. I was able to spot the trump supporters right away. They were physically heavier than the opponents, had shorter hair, and redder faces. When introduced, they all had occupations as blue collar workers. The Trump opponents were thinner, better dressed, and better educated.

The election of Donald Trump revealed that the divisions in America are primarily based on social class and education. This is nothing new. I watched the Ken Burns documentary The Vietnam War on television and the split between social classes was apparent at the time of that war. While students at many universities were demonstrating against the Vietnam War, blue collar workers were demonstrating in support of the war. I remember well that when students at Pace University in New York demonstrated against the war, construction workers on a nearby project became enraged and violently attacked the students.

There has always been an antagonism between the educated classes and the (so-called) working classes. This was manifested in historical revolutions such as the French Revolution. The deep hatred the common people (“sans-culottes”) held against the nobility was not so much based on wealth, but rather, on social status, manners, spoken language, clothing (the sans-culottes did not wear the culottes worn by noblemen), and education. The nobles disdained the sans-culottes, and they manifested that disdain in every encounter. Similarly, the Bolsheviks in the Russian Revolution hated the noble class primarily because of status and education and not because of wealth.

How can I say that? Isn’t wealth the real cause of resentment between the classes? Well, look at the beliefs and feelings of Trump supporters. Why do so many blue collar people identify with Donald Trump? He is a very wealthy man, possibly a billionaire. If it was wealth that they hated they would certainly not support the Donald. No, it is something else. Despite the fact that he has had a good education, Trump comes across as an uneducated man. He speaks in rough sentences with a very small vocabulary and a New York accent. He is probably not very self-educated. One gets the feeling that he does not read books and is unfamiliar with history, philosophy, literature, political theory, and other academic pursuits.

Many college graduates continue to learn after graduating. Many become autodidacts (self-educated), reading books, attending classical music concerts, and going to art museums. Trump gives evidence that he never does any of these things. One remembers the high style of John and Jackie Kennedy, with philosophers, intellectuals, and classical musicians in attendance at the White House. It is very doubtful that you will see any of that under Trump.

Like Trump, there are many college graduates who do not appear to be very educated. I have known a number of them. They went to college to get degrees in business, and avoided the more liberal arts subjects. One can hardly blame them. The business world is not crying out for art historians. Many of those ill-educated graduates became Trump supporters. You go into the houses of these people and there are no book cases and no books.

On the other hand there are many people who never went to college, or never attended for very long, who are extremely well-educated. One occasionally sees them on the TV show, Jeopardy. Do you remember Frank Spangenberg? They may never have had the money to go to college, or they may not have attended for other reasons, but they have always had a deep love of learning. They may have taken advantage of free libraries to become well educated, and may have spent their sparse earnings going to concerts or operas. They are more likely to be Trump opponents.

In the last election Hillary Clinton appeared to be the consummate intellectual. She showed scorn for Donald Trump. She picked a man for Vice President with blue-collar credentials to counter-balance the ticket. The blue collar voters hated her. Those voters vastly outnumbered the educated voters supporting Hillary Clinton. If it were not for the Black, Hispanic, and other minority voters, she wouldn’t have won the popular vote.

It is hard to calculate how deep the anger of working-class Americans is for the educated class. One hopes it goes no deeper than voting for someone like Donald Trump. There are Neo-Nazis, fascists, white supremacists, and other extreme right-wingers out there, and it is not impossible to imagine one of them trying for the White House. Just remember 1930s Germany.

EVIL

          I strongly disliked Donald Trump long before he ran for President. I always thought he was an arrogant blowhard, even back in the days when he gained fame for repairing the Wollman Skating Rink in New York. When Trump aired his “birther” beliefs, that Obama was not born in America, George F. Wills, to my delight, called him a “Bloviating Ignoramus.” When Trump declared for the presidency, I assumed he had zero chance. I believed that the American people thought of Trump as a publicity-seeking clown, and when asked what I thought of him as a candidate, I said that he was a joke.

            Like most intelligent persons, I was totally stunned when Trump won the election. I didn’t realize that there were so many uneducated, disaffected, stupid people in America. I didn’t know what to think of Trump. In my mind he was still a joke, and it was going to be a strange four years with this clown as Commander in Chief. I couldn’t imagine what kind of cabinet he would appoint or how he intended to carry-out his promise to “Make America great again.” I doubted he would greatly improve the economy, create jobs, defeat ISIS, halt illegal immigration, build his stupid wall, or repair the infrastructure of the country.

            With the exception of Steve Bannon, I was not particularly alarmed at the people he appointed to his cabinet. I should have seen Bannon as a red flag. From what I read, Bannon was a racist and alt-right-winger. But I did not look deeply into it. Some of Trump’s appointments bothered me, but I assumed that that was what you would expect of a conservative. I was not alarmed until the Charlottesville riots.

            The riots in themselves were not what alarmed me the most. I knew that those hate groups were out there and that they occasionally demonstrated, carrying automatic weapons, wearing swastika tattoos, and waving Confederate flags. I knew that their demonstrations would bring-out counter-demonstrations. What alarmed me were Trump’s statements about the riots. To him, there was wrong “on many sides.” He said that there were “fine people” on both sides. This balancing of denunciation was not just the stupidity of an incompetent chief executive. This was a statement of support for those low-life people who admire Adolph Hitler and the evil he perpetrated.

            I know that it is common for people of a political persuasion to accuse their opponents of evil, and I do not do it easily. You do not call your opponents evil for tax increases or cuts, military or domestic spending, welfare reform, or most social issues. Rather than accuse Trump and his henchmen of evil, I would prefer to accuse them of ignorance, malefaction, and mendacity. But here there is something much more serious. Here there is evil.

            I have spent my life studying the Nazis. I have found myself stunned and occasionally in tears reading about the Holocaust. I have found myself baffled by the horror of a so-called civilized nation setting out to imprison, starve, torture, murder, gas, and burn an entire race of innocent people. And yet, to my disgust, I have seen the mindset of those Nazi murderers copied and admired by some modern American people.

            I have examined the kind of people who were Nazis in World War II Germany. The major enforcers of Nazi horror, the Gestapo and the SS, were thugs and losers without education or societal respect. The anti-Semitic conservative masses went along with the Nazis. Hitler and his thugs started-out small, but gradually grew into a dangerous power.

When you look at the American hate groups you see the same kind of unrefined, crude, angry, bitter, ugly, stupid, uneducated thugs that supported Hitler in the 1930s and 1940s. I guess there are many such people all over the world. Educated, intelligent people have to work to prevent these thugs from gaining power. It will be much harder when you have someone like Trump in power. As I look at the Neo-Nazis, KKK, and White Supremacists today I see an evil that could grow into real political power if supported by people in high office.

RESPECT AND TRUMP

            When Republicans like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush were president, liberal Democrats opposed them with anger and vitriol. But there never was the kind of scorn leveled against them that we now see with Donald Trump. The difference, I believe, is respect. Past Republican presidents, like Richard Nixon, came in for heated opposition from Democrats, but there was always a certain underlying respect for the office of President that even the most avid liberals felt for them. Now, all over America, in streets and in the media, one sees demonstrations with banners claiming that Trump is “Not my president.” Millions of people not only oppose Trump, they refuse to acknowledge his victory in the presidential election. They refuse to respect him. I do not remember ever seeing such opposition to a president. This is what I call “Virtual Impeachment.”

            It is not just that Trump’s approval ratings are dismally low. Other presidents have experienced very low approval ratings. But after six months, Trump’s ratings should be an embarrassment to him. His current approval rating, according to Gallup, is 34%. Other polling firms have found similarly dismal figures for Trump. The weighted average from data-centric website FiveThirtyEight—a tracker that aggregates surveys and adjusts for quality, recency, sample size and partisan lean—pegged his approval at just 37.2 percent Friday, August 25, 2017. That's just 0.6 percentage points higher than his all-time low in the tracker. Trump's disapproval, meanwhile, stood at 56.8 percent Friday, according to FiveThirtyEight. According to FiveThirtyEight's tracker, no president in the history of modern polling has had an approval rating so poor at this point in his tenure, 

            Late-night comedians have always made a living by joking about incumbent presidents. Saturday Night Live has performed some brilliant skits lampooning Jerry Ford, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and even Barack Obama. But never in living memory have the spoofs and parodies carried such scorn as they do now with President Trump. Watch the first fifteen minutes of Seth Meyers each night and you get a hilarious take-down of President Trump and his colleagues. But it is not just Seth Meyers doing the ridicule. Watch Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Trevor Noah, and James Corden, and you will get a level of derision and disrespect not seen with any other modern president.

            Trump hotly denounces the News Media. He claims that they are producing “Fake News.” The problem is that not all in the News Media are liberals. It is surprising to pick-up the paper in the morning and find Trump being criticized by Republican columnists. People like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Jonah Goldberg, and Mona Charen, who are reliable conservative columnists, have been loudly criticizing Trump and his administration. Television news shows tend to highlight Trump’s many blunders, correcting his frequent misstatements and fabrications. Internet sites such as Facebook seem totally obsessed with attacks on Trump. If it were not for his blatant braggadocio, hyperbole, and mendacity, I would feel sorry for him.

            With so many people feeling that Donald Trump is not their president, it is a kind of Virtual Impeachment. Trump is experiencing a huge, tragic, lack of respect

SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH INSURANCE SYSTEM

           

With the President and most Republicans in Congress calling for repeal of Obamacare, and Republicans not able to get consensus on a new plan, we should consider the options that could easily solve our healthcare problems.

Canada and most of the countries of Europe have single-payer health insurance systems. I’m sure they are perplexed by our pretensions of being the world’s leading nation when we don’t even have a modern health insurance system. Under a single-payer system the American Government could provide health insurance for all citizens just as it does now for those on Medicare. It would also cover dental, eye, and psychiatric care.

There is another possibility. With the “Public Option,” a single-payer system would allow people who are not eligible for Medicare to purchase Medicare insurance from the government for prices far lower than they would pay under the current system. Although there was a strong effort made in Congress to include a “Public Option” when the ACA (Obamacare) was enacted, that effort was defeated by senators like Joe Lieberman from Connecticut--the insurance capital of America.

The main reason we do not have single-payer system is not that the public opposes such a change. Many polls show that Americans would prefer a universal health insurance program comparable to the system in Canada over the current system. Some 58 percent of respondents in a Gallup Poll support replacing ObamaCare with a universal healthcare system.

Nor is the reason we do not have a single-payer system that such a system would be more expensive for taxpayers and the government than the kind of private insurance system we have now. A single-payer system would actually save billions of dollars in health insurance costs. Private insurance companies in the U.S. spend about $400 billion a year on administrative costs. Under a single-payer system, in which Medicare takes-over payment of all healthcare costs, virtually all of those administrative costs would be swallowed by the Medicare department of the government. The government would simply provide Medicare for everybody, not just seniors.

 Medicare for everybody would also save billions of dollars for taxpayers. It would cost individuals only an extra 2 percent in taxes, or around $1,200 per year for someone earning $60,000 a year. That’s substantially less than most people currently have to pay for health insurance under the ACA.

The reason we do not have single-payer system is not that the quality of healthcare under a single-payer system would suffer. The truth is that our current healthcare system is very far from the best in the world. The countries with single-payer systems are doing far better than we are. The World Health Organization ranks the United States healthcare system 37^th in the World, behind Canada and all of the single-payer health care countries in Europe (We did beat-out Slovenia and Brunei).

The main reason why we do not have a single-payer system is that such a system would reduce the revenue of private insurance companies, and those companies have used their enormous power and wealth to strong-arm Republican and conservative Democratic legislators into blocking it.

A single-payer system would not put all health insurance companies out of business. They would be able to go on providing several types of health insurance, including the kind that we call “Medigap,” which is used by seniors today to pay for costs not covered by Medicare. They would also still be able go on selling Life, Property, and many other kinds of insurance.

           Right-wing demagogues will argue that a single-payer program is “socialized medicine.” That is mendacious nonsense. The same people argue that Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are socialized medicine. A single-payer system would not do away with private doctors. Under a single-payer system, people would be able to choose their own doctors, specialists, clinics, and hospitals.

Do we want to save lives and make it possible for everybody to have quality healthcare under an inexpensive system, or do we want to preserve the profits and privileges of the private insurance industry?