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May 25, 2017\u00a0(Occupy.com) \u00a0THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST<\/span><\/p>\n Americans like to indulge the notion that we are exceptional, a conceit that understandably sends non-Americans up the wall. But we are indisputably exceptional in a way that must baffle the rest of the developed world: our failure \u2013 or refusal \u2013 to implement universal health care.<\/p>\n Even Hong Kong, often and erroneously portrayed as a laboratory experiment in hands-off government, has what amounts to universal health care. The U.S. has never had anything like universal coverage, yet even \u201cObamacare\u201d \u2013 a piecemeal measure that narrows but does not close the uninsured gap \u2013 is often vilified as a kind of Bolshevik plot to collectivize medicine.<\/p>\n How is it that such an advanced society is so averse to an idea that\u2019s elemental in most of the developed world? The answer has to do with the individualist and anti-intellectual political culture that Donald Trump has ridden into the White House, and with the political power of a health care industry heavily armed to protect its own interests.<\/p>\n Of course, that\u2019s not the narrative you\u2019ll hear from the sort of people who despise not just Obamacare but the whole notion of a social safety net. They explain our gap-ridden health care by way of a healthy cultural aversion to big government. It\u2019s an interesting storyline, but it doesn\u2019t quite square with national programs like Social Security (an 82-year-old system comparable to Hong Kong\u2019s\u00a0Mandatory Provident Fund<\/a>), Medicare (universal \u201csingle-payer\u201d health insurance for people over 65) or Medicaid (government health insurance for the poor). Or with the fact that three-fifths of Americans would prefer a universal system.<\/p>\n If, by cultural aversion, conservatives mean cognitive dissonance, they may be on to something. The Tea Party \u2013 a populist antecedent to Trumpism \u2013 held feverish rallies in the early Obama years where inevitably some faux live-free-or-die insurgent in a tricorn hat would hold up a placard reading, \u201cKeep your government hands off my Medicare\u201d.<\/p>\n Even today, people who are sure they hate Obamacare \u2013 essentially a system of government-sponsored exchanges where people buy private insurance \u2013 aren\u2019t quite sure what it is. A recent survey by the polling firm Morning Consult found that 80 per cent of Republican voters strongly disapproved of \u201cObamacare\u201d, while only 60 per cent strongly disapproved of the \u201cAffordable Care Act\u201d. The punchline: They\u2019re one and the same. The very name \u201cObamacare\u201d helps explain the confusion. It\u2019s a term of derision ginned up by the Great Right Wing Noise Machine that tends to dominate the national conversation.<\/p>\n That gets us to the second problem with the cultural-aversion theory of freedom from health care: it casually omits a long history of scare tactics deployed by corporate propagandists at the mere thought of treating health care as a public good, not just a private privilege. As described by\u00a0The New Yorker\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0Jill Lepore in 2012, an early landmark in the annals of bought-and-paid disinformation was the 1945 defeat of a California proposal for compulsory health insurance. The propaganda provider was Campaigns, Inc \u2013 the world\u2019s first \u201cpolitical consulting firm\u201d, wrote Lepore \u2013 and the client was the California Medical Association.<\/p>\n By the 1990s, the art of bamboozling folks into mortal terror of accessible health care was a highly refined art. The height of the genre was surely Harry and Louise, a fictional couple despairing at the kitchen table over the Clinton proposal in a series of TV ads sponsored by the Health Insurance Association of America.<\/p>\n Most of the developed world no longer debates the soundness of universal health care for the same reason it doesn\u2019t debate the roundness of the Earth. In America, though, the flat-earthers are still on the scoreboard because they figured out long ago that public opinion is a gullible beast, swayed not by the strongest argument but by the loudest noise machine, and we all know who owns that.<\/p>\n Originally published by South China Morning Post<\/a><\/p>\n May 25, 2017\u00a0(Occupy.com) \u00a0THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST Americans like to indulge the notion that we are exceptional, a conceit that understandably sends non-Americans up the wall. But we are indisputably exceptional in a way that must baffle the rest of the developed world: our failure… Continue reading \n\n![\"healthcare,](\"http:\/\/www.occupy.com\/sites\/default\/files\/medialibrary\/170404-swin-zombie-trumpcare-bill-tease_lbszwk.jpg\" "\\"healthcare,")
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