COLUMN: When the Hurlyburly's Done

By Tobin Barnes
“Double, double, toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble.”
   
The current political scene is like something from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Soothsayers predicting dire calamity are haunting the nether regions. Talking heads have stirred the pot. Minions have flown to their assignments.
   
“By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes.”
   
Some vague evil has supposedly been unleashed.
   
This realm is headed for hell in a hand-basket. No saving us now!
   
So what’s up? What’s the deal?
   
Did I miss the memo?
   
Are we entering into another World War II that we could very well lose, changing the very fabric of life itself?
   
Nope. Unless maybe someone hits the wrong button somewhere, but that’s been the situation for the last sixty years.
   
Is there going to be a civil war that could permanently divide the country into two parts if a couple of battles go the wrong way?
   
I don’t think so, even though a small number of wild-eyed “patriots” have started brandishing guns and stocking supplies in anticipation of Armageddon.
   
Are we headed for another ten-year Great Depression where starvation for hundreds of thousands of citizens becomes a distinct possibility?
   
Again, it doesn’t seem so. Economists think we’re all-too-slowly but surely rising out of our current severe recession—admittedly now dubbed the “Great Recession.”
   
But is it really “Katie bar the door”? Have the hinges of American society truly snapped?
   
Sure…okay…we made some changes to the health care system.
   
Many of those changes, looked at individually, would seem to be good things: no denial of health insurance because of pre-existing conditions, no loss of insurance because of job changes, no canceling of insurance during or after the incursion of major health expenses.
   
So what’s so evil about all those?
   
Of course, to make those good things possible, we needed to expand the insurance pool. After all, the more people insured—close to everybody under the new system—the more the above benefits will work financially. Risk needs to be expanded wider, not narrower. Any reform necessarily has to have that plank.
   
Also because of the health care changes just passed, the Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan entity, estimates that the Federal budget deficit will be reduced by $100 billion in ten years and one-point-trillion something in twenty years.
   
Where’s the devil in that detail?
   
Not only that, but tens of thousands of lives will be saved per year because of better pre-emptive care currently unavailable to thirty-four million uninsured people. That sounds to me like a good-old American worthwhile objective.
   
And the cause of fifty percent of our bankruptcies will also be averted because hard-working citizens will be able to get the health-care monkey off their backs.
   
The changes are big, no doubt. But they had to be. And they’re no bigger than Medicare when it was introduced. And they’re no bigger than Social Security when it came about.
   
And what percent of the population would now like to give up those two programs?
   
No, it isn’t time for hyperventilation, rabble-rousing, threats, and hyperbole. When have those things ever done any good?
   
Let calmer heads prevail.