BLOGGING TOWARD SUNDAY…

Works and Words: We Need a Healing (Excerpted from a Speech by William Barber, President of the North Carolina NAACP and Pastor of Greenleaf Christian Church)

Too many Americans today are straining under the burden of two related trends: shrinking health care coverage and rising health care costs. Over the last decade, millions of Americans have found themselves uninsured, and millions more have become underinsured as the value of their coverage has declined. In the years 2008 to 2010, it is estimated that almost 6,000 people a day, or almost 7 million Americans total, will lose their health insurance. We must help our fellow Americans.

Dr. Martin Luther King said 40 years ago: “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”

Health care reform is not some kind of calculated socialism. It is common sense public policy. Tim Wise, a White social commentator, has said, “By allowing the right to throw around terms like ‘socialist’ to describe the President and ‘socialism’ to describe his….health care reform proposals without challenges is to ensure that the right will succeed in their demonization campaign….” Wise said it, and I agree this noise is about race. It is about “othering” a President. This is what animates the every move of some of the poor and working people who get sucked in by the fear mongering. Unless our Movement begins pushing back, and starts insisting that yes, the old days are gone, White hegemony is dead, and deserved its demise, and that all of us, Black, Brown AND White, will be better off for it, the chorus of White backlash will only grow louder. So too will it grow more effective at dividing and conquering the working people who would benefit – all of them – from a new direction.

If caring for all the people is “socialist” then Amos, the prophet in the Bible, was a socialist when he said “Let justice roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Isaiah was a socialist when he said “Loose the bands of wickedness and care for the poor among us.” Jesus Christ, the nonprofit prophet and healer, he was a socialist when he said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, give sight to the blind, and healing to the broken hearted.” If insuring
health care is socialist then Ralph Waldo Emerson was a socialist when he said, “You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”

If working for a the just society that provides health care for all Americans is socialist, then the founding fathers were socialists when they enumerated in the founding documents of this nation that the purpose of government was to work for the common good, not private prosperity alone.

Health care reform is not socialism. It is social justice and we must make this clear. We cannot allow the B.O.L. to dictate this debate. We cannot allow the three screamers – Mr. Beck, Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Limbaugh – to set the terms of this important discussion. The B.O.L. shouts loud to try to drown out our voices of truth and compassion. That is why we gather and lift our voices to speak. And to act. Health care for every American now.

We must take on every distortion and every lie. When they try to say there is a death panel in the current proposal, no, we must say. There is not a death panel in the current proposal but there is a death panel in the current system.

The death panel is the discriminatory system now in place. The panel of insurance claims adjusters who deny claims. Those who denied insurance because of pre-existing conditions. Those who set the cost of insurance that forces people to choose between food, paying the rent, or health insurance. This death panel keeps one out of four Americans at the mercy of every illness or accident and every lost job.

Systemic denial of health care to the poor, to working people and people out of work, to the 50-100 million Americans who need health care the most, to people with pre-existing diseases is a sin. It’s evil. It’s wrong. It’s unjust. It’s not American. It’s perpetuating a separate and unequal society. It’s cementing a Jim Crow health system in place for another century.

This is the United States of America. The richest country in the world. We want an American Health Care System –not a system that works for the rich and is dysfunctional for everyone else. W e want an American Health Care System — not a system that discriminates and excludes that picks and chooses who lives and who dies by the size of their bank account. The exclusive health system works fine for those with good jobs and big bank accounts.
The exclusive health care system belongs to them. But this is the United States of America. We need a United States of America Health Care System, the USA Health Care Plan. If you don’t understand that, then you don’t understand what America is. America is ours. America is all of us.

Excerpted from a speech delivered Aug. 29, 2009 at a rally held in Raleigh for supporters of health care reform For the full text of the speech, visit www.nccouncilofchurches.org.

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