*Updated below.
Although 70 percent of Americans now favor Medicare For All, the Knowledge Class is warning us to hold our horses for at least another couple of decades, by which time many of the uninsured and underinsured will be prematurely and conveniently dead. If climate change doesn't get us, untreated disease and despair should do the job in the efficient manner so beloved of the neoliberal thought collective.
That's because Medicare For All doesn't really mean Medicare For All. None of the various and sundry Democratic (read: Gentry Party) proposals has the aim of providing immediate relief to the tens of millions of people who lack coverage. On the contrary. There is no sense of crisis in any of them. With perhaps one exception, the proposals are incremental at best and purely profit-driven at worst. Even Bernie Sanders is only proposing an initial Medicare buy-in beginning at age 55. This is negotiating from a position of apologetic weakness, with the ultimate victory possibly being a compromise of getting Medicare by aged 60 rather than from birth.
Rather than honestly admitting this to the 70 percent, or 200 million (and counting) people who want government sponsored single payer health insurance, not a few of the politicians and corporate-funded think tanks claiming to favor Medicare For All are actually adamantly opposed to it. They just can't come right out and say it, lest their popularity suffer and their greedy inhumanity be exposed. They cannot acknowledge that their real constituents are corporations and wealthy people, who equate universal health coverage with an actual plague, and who are used to getting what they want from their servants in government and the media.
So instead, Democrats are falling back on the tried and true Kafka-esque method. They'll talk and they'll talk and they'll talk, and they'll gaslight us and guilt-trip us over Single Payer's "winners and losers," and they'll warn us about the costs and the dangers of achieving health care as a basic human right. And the Republicans will get to do their part by accusing these neoliberal corporatists of being Marxists-Leninists-Socialists.
And the technocrats will draw up their dozens and dozens of colorful pie charts to aid in the glazing-over of the eye and the melting of the mind. Everybody will become so exhausted and confused, the hope is, that Medicare For All will eventually die of its own wonkitude. (For the merest hint of the assaults yet to come, refer if you dare to the latest Vox explainer.)
This was the theme that Franz Kafka explored in most of his writing, in the economically depressed years between World War I and the rise of fascism. Even the most mundane tasks are fraught with such unnecessarily complex difficulties that they never are completed. Since there is no such thing as a simple problem, there can never be a solution. True to his own philosophy, Kafka didn't even complete several of his own stories, and even ordered that most of his work be burned upon his premature death. Thankfully his friend and executor, Max Brod, did not honor this request.
The only reason that (unlike the neoliberal wonk class) Kafka is not a complete downer, and remains popular nearly a century after his death, is that he had a wicked and humorous sense of the absurd, a sense that (making the neoliberal wonk class quake in fear and loathing) we ordinary slobs are all in this together and that our condition is pretty much universal.
This solidarity and unity are the exact opposite of what the political duopoly mean when they long for the good old bipartisan days, when Democrats and Republicans supposedly got along so well. To them, everybody must be divided between conservative and liberal, or more recently, between rural- deplorable and urban-enlightened. It's the main reason why they are so flummoxed by the Gilets Jaunes ("Yellow Vests") movement in France. Here are ordinary people acting, not out of ideology or identity, but in recognition that this is a class war, and it's global. They're emerging from their ordained isolation, and their unified anger is absolutely terrifying the ruling class.
Well, sort of terrifying them. French President Emanuel Macron hasn't gone so far as to repeal his infamous repeal of the wealth tax. He is doing an imitation of his friend and early booster Barack Obama by calling in the "fat cats" (les chats grosses) for a friendly gross chat in the Elysee Palace and mildly "browbeating" them into a voluntary relinquishment of a smidgen of their obscene profits to their employees. Whether, like the duplicitous Obama, Macron also claimed he was the only thing standing between them and the pitchforks, is not known.
But back to Kafka. The pretend-architects of a "Medicare For All" simulacrum are like the doorkeeper in his fable Before the Law. The supplicant (let's say it's for health care coverage) is told that he can't gain admittance just quite yet, but that if he's reasonable and patient, it's possible that he'll be allowed in later. As a gesture of good faith, he's even allowed a glimpse inside. And as he peers into the hope and brightness,
The doorkeeper laughs and says: "If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful. And I am only the least of the doorkeepers. From hall to hall there is one doorkeeper after another, each more powerful than the last. The third doorkeeper is already so terrible that even I cannot bear to look at him."
The supplicant wheedles, bribes and begs, and the doorkeeper teases and promises. Only at the very end, when the seeker is near death, does the doorkeeper inform him that nobody could ever be admitted because "the gate was made only for you. And now I am going to shut it."
The moral of this story, as I see it, is that the various wonky policy proposals for Medicare For All are about as artificial as the neoliberal architects who are fashioning them.
So enough of waiting for politicians to do the right thing. If we want entree to social and economic justice, we have to storm the gates and above all, reject the neoliberal dictum that we're lone economic consumers who must be in constant competition both with ourselves and with others in order to "succeed" in this best of all possible worlds.
But we are already being skillfully and subtly discouraged by the Explainers. If it took the Vox policy wonks (with the help of funding from investors NBC Universal and private equity giant General Atlantic) one whole month to read through all the "Medicare For All" proposals, the subliminal message is, it will take you ordinary people at least twice as long to try and make sense of it all. Meanwhile, they'll allow you to peer in to the turgid brightness for the time it takes to read their "explainer" piece and wade through the complexity of its myriad charts and graphs - if you can even make it through to the end. I could not.
But the basic gist is that if you like your plan you can keep your plan (sound familiar?), especially if you have employer-based insurance. It would be terrible, for example, if your boss were to lose his tax breaks on your premiums because you were selfish enough to enroll in government-sponsored health insurance.
Dash away, dash away, dash away all.
And the fraught, impossible choices? There's Medicare Buy-In For All, and Medicare Extra For All, and Medicare X, and the Choice Act, and Healthy America, and Medicaid Buy-In on the convoluted imaginary menu. Of course, Vox warns, buying into Medicaid doesn't translate into receiving actual care, since it would reimburse doctors at much lower rates than private insurance "typically" pays.
Other "universal" plans charted and explained by Vox appear to be nothing more than Obamacare with new labels attached to them.
Bait-and-switch is exactly how this eternal Kafkaesque game is played. All of these plans totally sidestep the reality that wealth inequality is the fundamental public health crisis of our time. Forty million Americans live below the official poverty line, and at least half the population are just a paycheck away from outright destitution.
As Dr. Michael Fine lays out in his book Health Care Revolt, Americans spent about 30 percent of total household income on health care and health insurance in 2017 - or about as much as we are expected to pay for housing. That is about $11,000 for every man, woman and child. Of that money, between $1 and $2 trillion is being skimmed off the top by the "market" as pure profit. Fine writes:
It's estimated that by 2025 we'll be spending 50 percent of household income on health insurance and medical services. By 2032, we will spend an estimated 100 percent of the average family income on health care. I hope you understand how that will work, because I don't. Neither does any economist. Think climate change is a threat to our planet? It is but many believe that climate change will take fifty to a hundred years to destroy the planet. Health care is on track to destroy our economy and our nation within fifteen years.
Donald Trump is not the only denialist in this Kafka-esque mix.
Franz Kafka also had a prescient thing or two to say about Trump's precious Wall, which I've written about in a previous post. The whole idea of the Wall, just like the Democrats' unnecessarily convoluted health care proposals, is that it will always be "a work in progress" and not something we should ever expect our leaders to actually complete. Gaps and holes are always essential if they are to keep us hoping, dreaming... and compliantly fearful.
They hate it when ordinary people poke holes in their manufactured holes.
*Update, 12/15. Well, isn't this convenient. On the very eve of this year's Obamacare enrollment period deadline, a federal judge from Texas has struck down the entire "Affordable" Care Act, declaring it unconstitutional. Judge Reed O'Connor also happens to an appointee of the newly-sanctified George W. Bush and is a member of the reactionary Federalist Society. Will Michelle Obama still love Junior "to death" and continue accepting candy from him at celebrity funerals after what his appointees and pals continue to do to her husband's precious legacy?
Anyway, here's my comment on the New York Times op-ed on the matter:
While we await the ultimate decision of the Supreme Court, what better time than now for Democrats to take the Medicare For All campaign up a notch or ten?
Look at this ruling as a blessing in disguise. The lucky 20 million or so Americans who have coverage under the ACA are not going to lose it right away, if ever, and meanwhile, the 30 million who have virtually no coverage at all will gain the additional clout to convince their reps that government-sponsored single payer insurance, from cradle to grave, is the only thing that will prevent these cruel and frivolous rulings in the future.
Just let the Supreme Court uphold this insane decision. Just watch the GOP sink when/if their voters are kicked to the curb.
Democratic leaders should finally be learning that negotiating with Republicans to the extent of adopting an actual GOP scheme (from the conservative Heritage Foundation) is not only a crazy strategy, it keeps giving ammunition to the experts who believe -- correctly, in my view -- that requiring citizens to purchase "product" from an essentially predatory cartel of private insurers is the wrong way to go about covering people. These companies skim trillions off the top of US medical care expenditures, making this country's market-based system the most costly and least effective in the civilized world. Better to require everybody to pay taxes, according to their means, to truly cover everybody. The reactionary judges won't have a leg to stand on.
In the Age of Trump, the word "wall" immediately conjures up the image of a 3,000 mile-wide monolith protecting America the Pure from hordes of immigrants and terrorists eager to steal our jobs and murder us in our beds. That this wall is and always will be just another Trumpian con job means absolutely nothing to his dwindling but loyal base of fans. You see, it's the thought that counts. It makes the dispossessed feel safer, just knowing that their renegade leader is mouthily gung-ho for yet another barrier between Us and Them.
Not to be outdone in the paranoia department, though, the Democrats and their neocon associates are also trying to sell us on a wall. Their version is a barrier in cyberspace that would keep out all the disinformation which, they say, emanates from Russia and its co-conspirators in the independent American media. Absent a democratic social agenda that would improve the lives of ordinary people, the Democratic Russophobes warn us to ignore our own lives and our own lying eyes. We should just admit that our brains have been infected by "fake news" so insidiously and for such a long time that we finally committed the ultimate atrocity: we unwittingly denied the presidency to Hillary Clinton.
If this all sounds disturbingly Kafkaesque, you're not being paranoid. You're facing the reality that we live in a country where gas-lighting is now the default governing strategy on both sides of the Duopoly. Franz Kafka, who creatively used metaphor and parable to warn of the totalitarianism knocking at the European door almost a century ago, was a big critic of walls and barriers of all kinds. He probably wouldn't be too surprised that the same thing is now happening in the United States.
Not for nothing did his last novel - Amerika - remain unfinished.
But in his posthumously published short story, The Great Wall of China, Kafka combines the very best fantastical formulas of both Trump and the Democratic Neocons. Notwithstanding their theatrical campaign of insulting tweets and counter-tweets, these two entities are disparate only on the surface. They actually complement each other in the core agenda of diverting our attention from our own worsening quotidian problems. Despite opinion polls showing that people are more concerned about their own health care than they are about the avalanche of tiny pebbles clumsily posing as blockbuster scoops from the New York Times and the Washington Post, the media-political complex is relentless in warning us we should worry more about the "constitutional crisis" of the rolling palace coup than about scrounging enough money together for next month's rent or insurance co-pay.
A new Bloomberg survey shows that although only six percent of the population is primarily concerned about Russia-Trump, the mainstream media is devoting more than half of all news coverage to McCarthyite scare-mongering.
Our "official" menu choice has thus devolved into two flavors of paranoia: Muslims and Mexicans entering the country, or the Russian takeover of our democracy. In other words, they're building a wall separating people from their own thoughts as well as from each other.
The main efficacy in the selling of a wall, Kafka observed, is that it is always a work in progress. It always has gaps. Holes are necessary, because not only do they create even more fear and paranoia, they engender a sense of purpose and national/party solidarity. If these dream walls ever did get finished, we'd end up feeling too safe for comfort.... for the comfort of our rulers, that is.
For them to maintain permanent control, they extend their walls' purpose to not only to keeping the Enemy out, but in dividing and conquering those who actually labor on the project The lowly workers are kept far away from both the middle managers and the elite architects who do the actual planning and thinking. And if something goes awry, guess who gets the blame?
Kafka explains how class structure as a method of control and fear is built into the human psyche from childhood:
"I can still remember quite well us standing as small children, scarcely sure on our feet, in our teacher's garden, and being ordered to build a sort of wall out of pebbles; and then the teacher, girding up his robe, ran full tilt against the wall, of course knocking it down, and scolded us so terribly for the shoddiness of our work that we ran weeping in all directions to our parents."
It doesn't get any better when these educated young people grow up and can't find a decent job paying a living wage. Kafka accurately described the cutthroat world of neoliberal meritocracy as the class-based division of labor - since time immemorial, we are either the designing few, or we rank among the many servants of the builders and designers.
The challenge to the elite rulers, therefore, is to be seen as keeping their promises, merely by keeping up the spirits of the people on the receiving end of their lies. This is the sweet spot where hope is invoked. Kafka describes how "piecemeal" wall-building is used as a ploy to keep those who toil for the elites both enthusiastic and pliant.
When people are exhausted and losing faith in the system, rulers will throw them a crumb and then a deflection. The following passage in Kafka's story mirrors the media-hyped euphoria surrounding the signing, and subsequent successful defenses, of the extremely limited kludge known as Obamacare. It's also apropos of the falsely-touted (fake news) withdrawal of American troops from the still-occupied and ever more destroyed country of Iraq:
"Accordingly, while they were still exalted by the jubilant celebrations marking the completion of the thousand yards of wall, they were sent far, far away, saw on their journey finished sections of the wall rising here and there, came past the quarters of the high command, and were presented with badges of honor, heard the rejoicings of new armies of labor streaming past from the depths of the land, saw forests being cut down to become supports for the wall, saw mountains being hewn into stones for the wall, heard at the holy shrines hymns rising in which the pious prayed for the completion of the wall."
If there's anything that rulers require, it's the unity of the populace who must be taught to settle for "piecemeal" solutions as they wave the flags and watch a lot of TV and attend many sporting events. No matter that our two establishment political parties appear to be falling apart at the seams; they were only populist fronts for the oligarchy in the first place. They'll happily subsist on the gold dust of their destruction until such time as they rise and thrive again.
As Kafka recounts in his parable, the elites are even able to absolve themselves when their ill-conceived Tower of Babel, built as it is on the ill-conceived Wall, is also never completed. It's definitely not their superior intellects which are to blame. After a thorough investigation by the designated experts, not only is nobody held accountable, they have the chutzpah to praise themselves for their insights.
"... The tower failed and was bound to fail because of the weakness of the foundation. In this respect at any rate our age was vastly superior to that ancient one. Almost every educated man of our time was a mason by profession and infallible in the manner of laying foundations.... How could the wall, which did not form even a circle, but only a sort of quarter- or half-circle, provide the foundation for a tower? That could obviously be meant only in the spiritual sense."
This is creepily reminiscent of John McCain insisting, after the financial system crashed in 2008 and millions of people lost their jobs, that "the foundations of our economy are still strong." It's eerily similar to former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan airily explaining away the Wall Street-generated subprime mortgage crime spree as "irrational exuberance." It faintly reeks of Barack Obama excusing war criminals by "looking forward, not back" and praising CIA sadists as well-meaning "patriots" who suddenly were trapped into "torturing some folks." When Donald Trump then babbles incoherently in compulsive tweets and opines that he has the right to pardon himself, it's not really all that extreme, once you stop and think about it.
There are other examples too numerous to mention of the boilerplate official excuse that "mistakes were made" to explain away such atrocities as aggressive war, torture and mass incarceration. There is never a lack of experts and pundits to roll out one Kafkaesque explanation after another to absolve the criminals residing in the very highest echelons of public/private power. Thus are we chided by the president's apologists never to take Trump's tweets literally, and by Democratic apologists to believe that 30 million uninsured Americans still enjoy universal "access" to health care, along with the promise that building walls against any number of Others will make our lives a happy, serene heaven on earth.
It's no surprise that Woody Guthrie's famous protest song "This Land Is Your Land" has been bowdlerized into a feel-good patriotic anthem taught to American schoolchildren. This supplements the teachers who are increasingly forced into toppling young people's towers of creativity and independent thought via for-profit standardized testing and curricula designed by corporations.
Here's what the Kafkaesque "High Command" doesn't want you to hear or sing or think:
"There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me;
Sign was painted, it said private property;
But on the back side it didn't say nothing;
That side was made for you and me.
In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?
Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me."
