by r------
Thu Jul 3rd, 2008 at 02:30:06 PM EST
Today, on my way to work, I listened to a National Public Radio report on the state of the health care system in Germany, a report which concorded globally, if not in the details, with my own experiences with the health care system in France. In terms of the actual report, the general thrust was to attempt to dispel illusions that Americans typically have about social health care, and as such, was accurate and also well argued, though given NPR's small audience, one which will fall, literally, on deaf ears. This is a big redwood tree, falling in the forest, but alas, few are there to hear it.
One piece of it, the Intro, really struck me as the first time in US media I have heard a theme we talk about often and which Americans, average Joe Six-pack Americans, simply don't get:
Germany has the world's oldest universal care system and is arguably the most successful. Like Americans, most Germans get their health coverage through their employers. But Germany's rich pay higher premiums to subsidize insurance for the poor -- a principle the Germans call "solidarity."
There's that word: Solidarity. And it's not just Germans calling it by name. It is the expression of our shared European values, of each according to ability, to each according to need. Or, if you prefer a less Marxian giving of the phrase, it is the product of a shared belief that we are all in this together. And it is a concept truly foreign to the values of Americans, for whom the overriding, if inefficiently and unevenly applied, value is Charity.
Now, I'd likely have gone on some polemic about the merits of Solidarity versus the merits of Charity, and I'd certainly have mentioned in doing so that others have covered this ground much better than I could hope to do. But on the way to writing that diary, another bit of news, this time personal: a neighbor, friend and mother of my children's friends here in the US was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer, which has spread to liver, brain and certainly other places. The prognosis is grim.
Those who know me know that, like Jerome, my child has had the terrible misfortune of a cancer diagnosis. Unlike Jerome, Malcolm's misfortune befell us in the United States. And so, first hand, I saw what lack of Solidarity means. Unnecessarily late diagnoses (and poor prognoses) due to lack of adequate health insurance coverage, resulting in potential exposure to hundreds of thousands of dollars in non-dischargeable debt and corresponding parental hesitancy at getting a sick child in to see the doctor in a timely manner. Seemingly arbitrary insurance rejection of treatment and palliative care options. Children who undergo treatment alone, who sleep alone when recovering in a strange and scary hospital environment, because their parent is unable to afford to take time off of their sometimes distant job for fear of loss of insurance, and loss of income to pay the rent, food, clothing and bills. Indifferent, no-pay last-served care for those with the misfortune of getting sick without insurance. And so on. Always a pretty firm lefty, my experiences with the US health care system radicalized me, filled me with a profound disgust with the bipartisan political class which found such a system satisfactory and a deep dismay with the attitudes of most Americans who, misfortune not having befallen them, most often seem oblivious of the travails of the least of their brothers.
Those who know me also know that I am about to move back to France. And, in sum, the primary reason is exactly this: Americans do not have this value of Solidarity; it has to be introduced, by way of an NPR radio piece, as essentially a foreign concept, and subsequent events of the day drove home to me just how alienating this lack of human values on the part of my (half-)fellow Americans is for me personally.
And it goes beyond healthcare. As Europeans, we take these things for granted, that if we, as spouses, die, our partner who survives us will not be at risk of poor health outcomes, bankruptcy, and homelessness and our children who survive us will still have access to quality educational opportunities equal to those of children upon whom misfortune has not befallen. We do so at our own peril.
As Europeans, we take for granted our equal access, on more or less meritocratic rather than class grounds, to the same university programs and degrees as anyone else. We do so at our peril.
As Europeans, we take for granted our ability to take time to recharge our batteries, go on holiday, spend time with our children and attend properly to our personal affairs. We do so at our peril.
As Europeans, we take for granted our ability to be cushioned, if imperfectly so, from the blow of losing one's livelihood, one's home and one's self-respect, due to quirk of market forces. We do so at our peril.
As Europeans, we take for granted, and increasingly so, our access to affordable and, if necessary, free social housing, for ourselves and our famililies. We do so at our peril.
As Europeans, we take for granted our right to feed and clothe ourselves, and buy for our children the bare educational necessities to give them an equal chance at success in school. We do so at our peril.
As Europeans, we take for granted our ability to properly take care of ourselves in our old age and, when the time comes, to be taken care of. We do so at our peril.
The peril is nothing less than undermining our core European value of Solidarity, and replacing it with the retrograde, and base, concept of Charity and Charity alone.
And so, after 12+ years in America, I'm moving, myself and my whole family, back to Europe. It's time. My job in Paris has already begun (I'm still working from the Twin Cities, but only for three more weeks). My lease in Chaville begins on 1 August. All the administrative formalities have begun, my consular registration ended, and I move on to a city I haven't lived in since the Montreal Canadiens last won the Stanley Cup. For all the talk I'm hearing around me about "Change We Can Believe In," the change I can believe in, after watching 12+ years of neo-liberalism in action, is to go back to my own core values, which are simply not found in America.
Accordingly, I have been observing the election in America unfolding before my eyes with an odd detachment, for the very fact of the matter is that 12+ years of hard knocks and first hand, painful experiences, have taught me that whatever changes come will not result from Solidarity, as changes tend to be grossly determined by underlying values, and Solidarity is not a core American value.
Does this mean I won't vote, as is my right, in the US election? Heaven's no! My absentee ballot application has already been sent off, and I have every intention to vote for the change other Americans, the full-blooded kind I guess, can believe in.
But the most important voting I will be doing won't be in the fall, but three weeks from now. For you see, I am voting with my feet.
