My Brother's Keeper?

We know how to reduce the cost of health care while at the same time providing care for those who can't access care now. We know because every other industrial country has shown us what works. We know in Colorado that health care costs could be reduced by more than a billion dollars annually and coverage could be increased to include everyone if only we transformed our health care system into a single payer model in which all health care income and expenditures were controlled through a public trust. We know that in those circumstances outcomes would improve, medical bankruptcy would become a thing of the past, people we know would not have to choose between paying for their medication or paying for their next meal and we know that we would never have to be worried about being denied for health insurance on the basis of that freak event in the distant past. Yet in spite of the fact that one health care model outshines all the others we are told by politicians and others the political will to make the change is simply not there.

The easiest option is to blame those self-same politicians for our lack of political will because, as we all know, politicians' pockets are lined with health insurance dollars. But blaming the politicians, or even firing the politicians who lack the political will would not get at the more fundamental problem we face. Likewise, blaming the insurance companies or the pharmaceutical companies for dissuading politicians from developing the necessary political will is also somewhat disingenuous. The real reason for our lack of political will to do the right thing in health care is that we in the United States simply don't care enough about each other.

I realize that in a nation in which Lady Liberty greets foreign travelers with the refrain, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” the accusation of lack of compassion is heresy or worse. But the cold hard facts in our national life can lead us to no other conclusion. American Chief Executive Officers are paid obscene amounts of money when compared to CEOs in Europe and Japan . In Canada the average CEO earns twenty times what the average minimum wage worker will receive. In Great Britain the average CEO earns twenty-two times his minimum wage worker. Hong Kong CEOs earn forty-one times the amount, but in the United States the CEO wage is 475 times the wage of the minimum wage worker. So the first point is that we are the world's leading nation at wealth inequity. Where is the compassion in that?

Corporations, like it or not, are the real drivers of our economy, and if the trillions they earned were taxed fairly, compassion might come easier. We have the second highest tax rate for corporations, just behind Japan , but we also have far more tax loopholes than other nations so corporations which could fund a more compassionate society do no such thing. Indeed the Government Accountability Office reports that 72% of all foreign corporations and 57% of U. S. corporations doing business in the United States paid no federal income taxes for at least one year between 1998 and 2005, in spite of the fact that corporate sales amounted to $2.5 trillion in that time. Does this demonstrate the true nature of compassion.

The flip side of the wealth of CEOs is the poverty of so many others. The United Nations Development Program uses the human poverty index in order to assess and compare poverty. The human poverty index takes into account the likelihood of a child not surviving to age 60, functional illiteracy rates, long term unemployment and the size of the population living on less than 50% of the median income of the country. Using those measures out of 18 industrial countries evaluated the United States ranked 16 th . Doesn't such a high poverty rate suggest we have much more to learn about compassion?

Being poor in America is not just about having to wonder about your next meal; it may also be about staying out of jail. The initial purpose of the penal system was to provide some reformation, to help reshape the way the criminal looked at his world. But the American penal system has become much more about ware-housing. The United States incarcerates the largest number of people in the world. In part that might be explained based on our large size, but we cannot because the United States incarceration rate is four times the world average. We do not discriminate, however, as we also incarcerate the most women in the world. Yet a close look at crime rates would suggest that crime rates in the United States do not account for incarceration rates. Can we truly claim to be compassionate if this is how we treat the “least of these our brothers and sisters?”

Yes, we need health care reform. And I, for one, will remain convinced until proven otherwise that the best kind of reform would be the implementation of a single payer health care system. But we may not get the right reform until we have a “compassion revolution” in this nation, a revolution in which CEOs value the work performed by those at the bottom rungs of the company ladder more than they value the size of their own golden parachutes, a revolution in which corporations pay their fair share of taxes so the burden of supporting our infrastructure, our health care, our education system and our retirements does not fall so squarely on the shoulders of those who can least afford it, a revolution in which the shame is not being in poverty but in finding someone else in poverty and not lifting them out, a revolution in which we know more about forgiveness and reformation than we know about revenge and retribution. After the compassion revolution is won, health care reform is easy.

Pathway To A Healthy America

Who the health cares?

Endorsements

• County Commissioners of Gunnison County
• County Commissioners of San Miguel County, including City of Telluride
• County Commissioners of Pueblo County

What about Montrose County ?????????

• Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
• The correct bibliographic citation for the definition is:
• Preamble to the Constitution of the World Health Organization as adopted by the International Health Conference, New York, 19-22 June, 1946; signed on 22 July 1946 by the representatives of 61 States (Official Records of the World Health Organization, no. 2, p. 100) and entered into force on 7 April 1948.

The Definition has not been amended since 1948.