If basic healthcare is a privilege, what rights do we have? | Jamie Peck

A right-wing hero was born this past Sunday during the combination bikini contest and civics test that is the Miss USA pageant. In an effort to probe how she’d solve our nation’s problems, host Julianne Hough asked Miss Washington DC (aka Kara McCullough) if she believed “affordable healthcare for all US citizens” was “a right or a privilege,” and why. McCullough answered by saying:

“I’m definitely going to say it’s a privilege. As a government employee, I’m granted healthcare and I see firsthand that for one to have healthcare, you need to have jobs. So therefore, we need to continue to cultivate this environment that we’re given the opportunity to have healthcare as well as jobs to all American citizens worldwide.”

Currently unemployed people, as well as those with bad jobs that don’t provide healthcare, are presumably out of luck. That McCullough wants to help women find work in Stem jobs is admirable, but does nothing to help the vast majority of people.

Of course, her statement is technically true. As things currently stand in the US, healthcare is a privilege, and one you likely need a job to access. (And not just any job … a salaried and/or union one, a holy grail that’s fast disappearing.) As a person with both a job and healthcare, she’s observed this firsthand. But as Ms McCullough is a nuclear scientist, I will assume she understood the question was about how she believes things should be, not how they are. In which case, she’s as wrong and out of touch as any DC royalty currently making policy on this issue.

Now, I’ll admit it’s tough to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that people deserve basic levels of physical safety simply by virtue of being human. To do so would require a philosophical deep dive above my level of expertise. But our founding documents — which I’d hope someone with the surname “USA” respects — have already sided with the “yeas” on the existence of certain inalienable rights, chief among them “life.” And an estimated 45,000 Americans die each year from lack of health insurance. This is not just another commodity, but a necessity on the level with food and shelter. Which, to be fair, Republicans also want to take away from the poor.

Beyond that, it comes down to a simple matter of preference: do you want to live in a society that codifies some level of responsibility to our fellow citizens, or would you rather roll the dice on a Randian dystopia where the lazy, unlucky or otherwise uncompetitive are liquefied into paleo shakes for rich people? Maybe I can’t objectively prove which is “better,” but I know which I’d prefer. Contrary to what social Darwinists would tell you, one cool thing about being human is we (theoretically) get to decide which ideals we want to pursue.

When healthcare is a for-profit enterprise, costs skyrocket and access plummets. While the Affordable Care Act reined in some of the industry’s worst abuses, an estimated 27 million are left uninsured under it, a number that’s slowly climbing as companies raise premiums and pull out of exchanges.

Even those who are insured report problems paying for care due to high deductibles, and, more generally, to being insured by companies whose business model is to dole out as little coverage as they can legally get away with. The Republican party is currently in the process of turning 27 million into 52 million with their ironically named “American Healthcare Act.” Soon, 45,000 deaths a year will seem like the good old days.

As every other country in the developed world knows, the only way to increase coverage to 100% — as well rein in absurdly high per capita spending on a bloated private industry — is with a system of state-funded healthcare. It works everywhere else, and many experts say it would work here.

The American people are on board. A 2017 Economist/YouGov poll found about 80% of Democrats and 40% of Republicans — yes, Republicans! — favor a federally funded health insurance system that covers all Americans. All race, age, income, and gender demographics favor it by simple majorities, and many — particularly the most marginalized — by strong ones. Even Republicans and conservatives approach 50%. Those who voted for Hillary Clinton favor it at a rate of some 85%.

Unfortunately, this is one of many areas where the country’s political class refuses to even remotely entertain the will of the people. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are willing to do the empathetic, fiscally responsible thing.

We all know Republicans will happily let people die to pay for oligarchs’ tax breaks. But even most elected Democrats remain irrationally committed to compromising with an industry that wants you dead. This becomes more comprehensible when you look at the amount of money the insurance lobby gives to both parties. Despite its immense popularity with voters, single-payer will be on neither party’s agenda in 2018.

In stating that affordable healthcare is a privilege that should be reserved for gainfully employed people, McCullough showed she’ll fit in just fine with the other undemocratically elected rulers in DC. President Trump might not own the Miss USA pageant anymore, but his cutthroat spirit lives on.

If basic healthcare is a privilege, what rights do we have? | Jamie Peck

Democrats embracing Tea Party tactics? That won"t work without a new ideology | Jamie Peck

While Republican lawmakers were colluding with vice president-elect Mike Pence about how best to repeal — and probably not replace — the Affordable Care Act on Wednesday, President Obama held a meeting of his own. Unlike many previous meetings of his, Republicans were not invited. He did not “reach across the aisle.”

Instead, the outgoing president laid out a strategy to oppose Republican efforts to repeal his signature healthcare legislation, a move that could kick up to 30 million Americans off health insurance. That strategy involves pushing the phrase “Make America Sick Again,” refusing to “rescue” Republicans by helping them pass bound-to-be-Randian replacement measures and referring to the resulting disaster as “Trumpcare,” as in: “I would have gotten my leg set by a doctor, but thanks to Trumpcare, I’m using Scotch tape.” The political fallout, he said, must solely hurt the Republicans. (Sounds like someone is finally jumping on the Bernie “time to admit you lied” Sanders train.)

Contrast this with remarks made back in April in which Obama warned his party against becoming too much like the Tea Party. Speaking to a group of law students in Chicago, he worried that Democrats would “stake out positions so extreme, they alienate the broad public.” He’s hardly become Eugene Debs, but it seems he’s come around to a more confrontational strategy. (Funny how your priorities change when you go from quelling a left-insurrection to trying to quell a right one.)

In instructing his party to openly vie for power and engage in the muck of actual politics rather than genteel tinkering, the president became the latest and most high-profile advocate of an idea that’s finally picking up steam in mainstream Democratic circles: copying the Tea Party, a faction which, for better or for worse, was and remains devastatingly effective at carrying out its program.

Beginning immediately after Obama’s 2008 election, a vocal, ideologically-driven minority of “activists” began storming town hall meetings, pressuring Republican representatives to resist Obama no matter what he tried to do and purging their party of anyone deemed insufficiently reactionary. Eight years later they enjoy a unified right-wing government and undisputed dominance of the Republican Party. Gone are the days when Congressional Republicans will let themselves be cucked by compromise. It’s high time the Democrats sunk to their level.

A 23-page Google document titled “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda” has been spreading around Washington faster than John Podesta’s risotto recipe. Written by a group of Congressional staffers who witnessed the rise of the Tea Party firsthand, it lays out a number of practical ways progressive activists and lawmakers can defend the incremental gains of the Obama era using Tea Party tactics, minus the physical intimidation and rabid racism.

Operating on a local level, acting defensively and waging constituent phone call campaigns are all ideas that can easily be appropriated. Considering the razor-thin margins by which Republicans won in many states, it should not be hard to frighten Republican representatives with the prospect of getting voted out.

Activists can also empower (or pressure, as the case may be) Democratic lawmakers to stand up for progressive principles, and this means tugging the political spectrum back to the left. Republicans have long known it’s foolish to start negotiations in the middle. They stake out extreme positions — a six-week abortion ban, a complete gutting of the Office of Congressional Ethics — so they can bargain down to what they actually want — a 20-week abortion ban, a “bipartisan” gutting of the OCE.

In contrast, Democrats said they were open to replacing Obamacare before Congress was even in session, voted to authorize the Iraq War and competed throughout the 1990s to show they could put black people in prison and dismantle the welfare state with the best of them. They let the ACA’s public option fall to the threat of a filibuster from Joe Lieberman, which they could have easily withstood if they’d wanted to. Even now, they deride the Tea Party’s tactics as childish and crass, when the truly crass thing is that 45 million people are living in poverty in the richest country in the world.

Of course, what the Google doc and the president fail to mention is that this only works if the Democrats are progressive in the first place; there can be no left-Tea Party without an organizing ideology. Which brings me to another Tea Party tactic: the purge.

While some Democrats (Elizabeth Warren, logical left-Tea Party choice for DNC chair Keith Ellison) are already reasonably progressive and more can potentially be dragged left by political expediency, many are simply too committed to neoliberal ideology and/or beholden to monied interests to be rehabilitated. Which means some pink-slipping and primary-challenging is in order.

Time travelers from the New Deal era would be confused to learn the leftmost major party’s 2016 nominee for president ran her primary campaign against the $ 15/hour minimum wage, tuition-free college and single-payer healthcare, deriding these common sense reforms as pie-in-the-sky fancies on the level of Trump’s wall, and only begrudgingly adopting certain elements of them once it became clear the left wing of her party might revolt.

In the general election, Trump exploited establishment Democrats’ longstanding support of labor-opposed trade deals to stake out a leftward position that threw the Clinton campaign for a loop. Despite the benefit of hindsight, many in the party’s leadership still refuse to recognize the role these failures played in their 2016 defeat.

For all the New Democrats’ talk of pragmatism over ideology, it seems the truly practical thing would be to grow some sort of ideological backbone. Those who refuse to do so must be left in the woods.

The good news is that once this happens, progressive activists and lawmakers will be able to use Tea Party’s tactics better than the Tea Party itself, because the left has actual grassroots movements.

Black Lives Matter, Fight For $ 15 and Bernie Sanders’ remarkable campaign are all examples of regular people coming together to effect change that put the Tea Party’s “grassroots” theatrics to shame.

If these movements have already achieved some modest victories on their own, imagine what they’ll be able to do with the legislative and monetary powers of a newly invigorated Democratic Party at their disposal. What the party may lose in large donations, it will gain in small ones, votes and the ability to fix this mess.

And that’s worth spilling some tea along the way.

Democrats embracing Tea Party tactics? That won"t work without a new ideology | Jamie Peck