My grandfather has always been a hero of mine. The son of a poor Pennsylvania farmer, he only achieved an 8th grade education before he left for the war, and after fighting in some of the worst battles in the Pacific theater of World War 2, he returned, took a government job working on a road crew, and got started building a family. And that single job would provide both the income and the benefits necessary to keep what became a family of four stable, healthy, and prosperous. Average house, two cars, some acreage in the back, and two kids put through college debt-free. One job was all it took. One good job.
And that one job was not terribly different from any other job available at the time; while there were differences in pay and benefits between jobs, most full-time work came with full benefits, a living wage, and in most cases, a full pension. In fact, I’ve heard many stories about workers from this era starting and quitting jobs suddenly because the similarity between jobs gave them the freedom to choose careers based on what they enjoyed doing rather than what they must do to survive. Unlike today, workers once possessed at least some freedom to do the work that mattered most to them.
It wasn’t perfect, or even in the vicinity of perfect, but anyone who looks at the present state of work in America compared to its past quickly discovers that most workers from previous generations had a great deal more freedom than workers do today. And while healthcare access is only one of many reasons for this deficiency, it is a significant one, and one that we can and should remedy.
Here’s my argument in its shortest, most condensed form: Our employer-based healthcare system exists so you and I can’t leave our jobs. This is why corporations and their armies of lobbyists will resist universal healthcare with every dirty dollar they can muster. Even though shedding their healthcare responsibilities would be a massive boon to their bottom lines, they will still resist because they know what will happen if workers start clawing back any of the power we have lost over the last couple of generations. Simply put, if American working people could do the work we want to do, few of us would do the work we are currently doing. And for many of us, healthcare is a major reason why we stay in jobs we hate.
For some reason I have never quite understood, the healthcare discussion in America has always been about cost and cost only. I suppose that’s what the message makers want. As long as the argument is about cost only, it’s easy to demonize universal healthcare as a tax increase and nothing more. That’s how corporations have been defeating these arguments for decades.
But a worker with choices is freer than a worker without, and while the billionaire class loves to sell freedom to the masses to get their chosen politicians into office, actual freedom for working people is the last thing any corporate executive wants. It’s much easier to simply buy the politicians, write the laws the corporations want, and chain American workers to the jobs they hate. It sucks for us, but our happiness has never been the goal, and that too is a problem we can and should fix. Universal healthcare would make working families more free, and there is nothing more American than that.
I’d like to close with a question that I think clarifies both the moral and the economic concerns we now face. Simply ask yourself, “What is an economy for?” Some believe profit is the only answer, and those people currently run just about everything. But the American economy exists, or at least it should exist for the sole purpose of making good lives for American working families. Full stop.
In two generations, we have gone from a nation where many if not most full-time jobs could support a family to a nation in which nearly half of us don’t earn a living wage, where households now average three or more jobs just to make ends meet, and where healthcare debt bankrupts more families than any other cause. I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough. It’s time to start taking back what has been lost, and healthcare is as good a place to start as any.
I don’t know much, but I know that.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.