Pick up any newspaper, watch any TV news show, go over any poll results and the inescapable conclusion is that the body politic, which is all of us, is angry, frustrated, convinced that all of our institutions are failing us and ready to kick the entire bunch out, or at least the half that we blame for it all.
What’s going on? Why is everyone so angry? Are these really such perilous times? Real answers, not necessarily “feel good” answers, are very difficult to come by.
Try to look at it in a detached way for a moment.
After more than a decade of active war in Iraq and Afghanistan and several trillion dollars in cost, it’s all pretty much winding down and about over. Did we win, lose or was it a draw? In fact, is that even the right question to ask? Has terrorism been abated or has it just changed its mailing address?
We are going to have to leave those answers to the historians. Of course that doesn’t mean there aren’t hundreds of politicians, spinmeisters, editorialists, bloggers and some well-known cable show hosts eager to answer those questions for you, and tell you why you should be unhappy, very unhappy. Sadly, we have a lot of people in the “scare the crap out of us” business for which they are very well paid and they are very good at it. They tell us what we used to call boogeyman stories, and we run around in circles screaming, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling, run.”
So again let’s try and detach for the moment and review reality.
The wars are drawing to a close. The economy is improving, not for everyone, and certainly not in a way that many people feel is fair, but it is definitely improving.
The bailouts worked. The banks are once again doing OK and American industry, meaning GM and Ford, is producing and selling cars. On a whole, the Treasury has been paid back most of the bailout money.
We still have the largest economy in the world, by far, and even though the Chinese have made incredible strides, they haven’t yet begun to deal with their problems. The empty buildings, the precarious real estate boom, the population leaving the countryside and the terrible air in the cities, among other things on their plate.
We, on the other hand, seem to have done better than Europe, which seems kind of stuck in the mud. Probably because it is a confederation and we are a country. If a tornado hits the Midwest, we don’t question if we should help them, our answer is obvious. We’re countryman and we go to each other’s aid. That’s why I believe countries generally work better than confederations.
Next, we turn to clearly the issue du jour, du month, and perhaps du year if they manage to stretch into November: Obamacare. The one thing we know is that when it comes to the delivery of health care to millions of Americans, the best we can say is that the website stinks. Before a single stethoscope has touched anyone’s chest, before a single scalpel has cut anything, many in the chattering class have already pronounced Obamacare “DOA.”
Most of those pundits make a lot of money telling us how bad everything is, while they get Cadillac health plans from their employers or are in Congress and can go to Bethesda Naval Hospital. If we could all go to Bethesda, we wouldn’t need Obamacare. But we don’t, so we do.
We have legions of uninsured. Half of our population has some preexisting conditions, which is not terribly surprising since we are an aging population and bound to have health problems.
I’m at an age where the first 15 minutes of conversation with any friends I haven’t seen for a while consists of the mutual exchange of medical information. No one escapes, or to put it more accurately, no one escapes alive. So why are we all so shocked when things happen, people get sick and die and we are all barely one or two major illnesses away from bankruptcy?
Is Obamacare a good law? Yes. Does it work well? Probably not. Are we going to have it fixed by next Tuesday, or some Tuesday in 2014? Highly unlikely. It’s probably going to take five to 10 years to work out the kinks, modify it where necessary, get control of the costs and bring in the young.
I’m guessing we will probably end up with some sort of public minimum coverage for all, and Cadillac coverage for those who can afford it. And if you think this is a tough problem, the real problem is going to be what are you going to do with all these old people we’ve managed to keep alive? Who is going to pay for their long-term care? I can assure you that I, and many of my friends, intend to linger as long as we can.
So there. If you want to blame it all on Obama, feel free to do so. However, I can assure you that President Clinton II or President Christie I are going to have their hands full.