Supreme Decision

The impending Supreme Court consideration of the Universal Health Care legislation is certain to generate great debate in legal and ideological circles. The technicalities of the law will be a minor part of the popular discussion. But, we can be assured that the most caustic battles will occur on that field where the most paradoxical cognition and/or vacuous dogmatism will be ineluctable - the ideological front. Many have or will initiate their attack or defense of the program from an ideological set-point, but for me a synoptic understanding of the particulars of the issue necessitate a different process.

My secular mentality never allowed me to divinize the primacy of the free market and separate it from the working of common sense. The conceptualized new legislation was predicated on the fact that health care in this country is unaffordable for many and is on a trajectory to be out of reach for most, with little evidence that the unfettered free market will offer any special dispensation to meliorate this trend in the foreseeable future. So, the question then becomes what can or should be done about health care. Can it be an “industry” whose underlining raison d’être is the care of the corporeal body and relieving of physical suffering wrought by the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, which should legislatively be abandoned to fickle and uncaring winds of the marketplace, at the same time all manner of tax exemptions, perks, and privileges are granted to religious organizations whose mandates are the disposition of the intangible soul.

It is not my intent to attack religion, but I believe all the complexities of the debate ultimately boil down to the dichotomy of how we resolve our dealings with the same inheritances from the natural world and human awareness that teach us to esteem our bodies as well as our souls. If we include special indulgence for religion in the fabric of our social contract as integral to “the promotion of the general welfare”, how can we be so dissociative when it comes to mutual care of our brief mortality?

Whether we wish to associate ourselves with the implication of the phrase “promote the general welfare” or the legal delicacies of the Commerce Clause, it may be instructive to examine the passive acceptance of the body politic to the huge and indecent expenditure on our military, which is frittered away on non-existential threats, not to our nation, but to our world hegemony and empire. So, if it a matter of how our commonwealth is spent, and if we are a truly free people, not indentured to any ideological master, why can’t universal health care be a legitimate social construct simply because we want and need it?