In a recent column I referred to a July 6 Washington Post story, which reported the for-profit health care industry was spending approximately 1.4 million dollars a day to defeat reform of the U.S. health care system. As Barack Obama continues to ride a popular groundswell hungry for reform, desperation is growing among the corporations that owe their profits to their monopolistic control over our access to medical care. I’d be willing to bet their spending levels are up, but the quality of their message is definitely down. But what is truly heartbreaking – and alarming – is the number of Americans who’ve drunk the Kool-Aid.

In an August 15 New York Times opinion letter, Obama wrote: "We are bound to disagree, but let’s disagree over issues that are real, and not wild misrepresentations that bear no resemblance to anything that anyone has actually proposed. This is a complicated and critical issue, and it deserves a serious debate.”

But the profiteers of health care are not interested in serious debate because they know on that level they will lose. And so they have reverted to the right wing’s stocks-in-trade: disinformation and fear-mongering. Righty think tanks, columnists, bloggers, and members of Congress have been busily trying to outdo one another with ridiculous claims of health care rationing, death panels, national bankruptcy, and that old favorite, socialistic government takeover. All of these nuggets are easily disproven (for example, by visiting the MoveOn.org website), but here’s where the long-range goals of so-called conservatism bear their most useful fruit.

Contrary to right-wing panics about “wealth redistribution” in our country, wealth has increasingly flowed upward in the decades since the “Reagan Revolution” that largely freed corporate America from public oversight. Millions of Americans were struggling (or failing) to make ends meet far before the housing bust or the Wall Street fiasco. This is why the issue of health care, which so clearly delineates the fundamental inequities of American society today, is such a flash point. Why, in a democracy, would the majority choose a model that actually promotes poor health, erects barriers to treatment, and actually does threaten to bankrupt the nation? The answer, of course, is that they wouldn’t. IF, that is, alternatives are presented clearly and honestly.

Which of course is not what is happening. As corporate-owned media outlets continue to ignore, as they have so often done before, their responsibility to “fact check” claims by the right the field is thrown open to any kind of exaggeration, lie, or, as we are now seeing, tactics of intimidation reform opponents can come up with.

Sadly, the strategy of spreading disinformation, lies, and fear work best in a poorly- or under-educated society. For a long time Republican operatives and their weak-willed colleagues in the supposedly liberal party have worked, under the rubric of “fiscal responsibility” to underfund, among most other public institutions, the American educational system. One hardly needs to refer to the United Nations’ Index of International Education Standards to check their progress when you can just turn on the TV and see your fellow middle-class American bellowing against his own interests at a town hall meeting. It resembles nothing so much as a guy unknowingly walking around with a “kick me” sign on his rear end. (In 2008 the United States ranked nineteenth in the index, below Lithuania but beating out Kazakhstan . No doubt some “great Americans” now monopolizing air time on New Mexico ’s dominant radio network take this as another good reason to dismantle the UN.)

But the most damaging effect may have been to the image of knowledge itself. “Sorry, Snobs: Town-Hall Rage is Real Democracy” screamed the headline of an eastern newspaper owned by the world’s richest media baron. Emotional envy directed at a neighborhood “smarty pants” may not be uncommon among children, but it’s an alarmingly stupid way for supposed grownups to make democratic decisions.

Nevertheless, without a single shot of reason being fired, the only true path to limiting health care costs, a single-payer system (most easily described as Medicare for all), has been completely removed from consideration by legislators-for-hire and the private gatekeepers of public information.

The true conflict is not over rationing, death panels, national bankruptcy, or socialism. The real bone of contention is that cleverly hidden behind all right wing onslaughts: taxes. More specifically, what has so fully mobilized those who haven’t hesitated to divide in order to conquer, is the possibility that those in the upper income brackets may have to pay a pittance more (surely less than a vacation house or gold-plated toilet seat) to heal the country.

You don’t see them rioting at town-hall meetings. They’re too clever to show themselves. Like old men sending the young under the guns, they direct from behind, and later write heroic eulogies to those who have so bravely fallen – in this case, under a mountain of medical bills.
At this point we should ask ourselves: who are we compromising with? Are we so easily wooed by the silver tongues of those with their feet on our necks that the end result is simply more business for them? If America is truly a great country, it’s time to show it.

Dave Wheelock is a collegiate rugby coach and sports administrator. Reach him at davewheelock (all one word, lower case) at yahoo.com. Mr. Wheelock's views do not necessarily represent those of Socorro News, but frequently do.

Copyright 2009, Dave Wheelock; all rights reserved. Originally published in the Mountain Mail and reprinted with permission of the author.