The Government Screws Up Everything. Why Not Healthcare Too?

As someone who has spent most of his life struggling against government policies and actions, someone who looks with a jaundiced eye at the bureaucracy as a slothful beast and who is quick to say, stop, change or reform; I find myself in pretty unfamiliar territory here.

I keep hearing the argument that the government screws up everything, so why on earth would I want to encourage us to adopt a national program for anything, in this case, health care.

The government has seemingly pursued me throughout every step of my life and made every moment a little more difficult. I felt like a Valjean pursued by a Javert and more than once implored, "why can't they just leave me alone?"

So like a lot of you, when someone says, "the government sucks" we just nod our heads in agreement and dream our dreams of an anarchist land of milk and honey where everyone plays by the golden rule and we don't have to put $2 in the parking meter or work until May every year to start contributing to our own well being.

Maybe it is the age in my bones or as some of you have suggested, the bats in my belfry fluttering around, but listen to this...

I don't think that the government sucks.

The thought first crept into my head when I was on a plane flying out of Boston a week or so after the September 11^th attack. Like a lot of us, we were pretty anxious about being in a plane. As we sat there on the tarmac, I thought about all the maintenance and labor that went into getting the plane in the air. The pilot and the crew, the air traffic controllers and all the folks that were trained to get us from point A to point B. Of course, we had the added element of thinking about the military keep our flight safe. We were willingly vulnerable and in the hands of government rules, regulations, policies and training. It didn't matter how John Wayne tough we were or if we were Einstein brilliant, we were dependent on the government that sucks.

George Bush was the president then. I didn't vote for him and tried really hard not to despise him. I thought he was incompetent and the country had the wrong hands at the helm. Yet, it was working to the extent that I was entrusting my life to it.

Why in the world was I doing this. I should have drove. Then I would have to trust that the bridges wouldn't fall down, the pavement wouldn't fall away at 70 mph, an over loaded tanker full of zarcon six wouldn't burst next to me, the truck drivers wouldn't be too overdosed on methamphetamine and all the traffic signals would work. The nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island might blow me off the Pennsylvania turnpike.

And yes, all these bad thing happen, but it is the government that is in place trying to see that they don't.

I wish that there weren't any wars. I wish that all of our swords were beaten into plowshares, but until they are I want the military to do the best job they can. When we ship off our kids to fight somewhere, we want the best equipment and training. We wave our flags and beat our drums. We do it again when they come back and we are proud of their sacrifice. They are employed by the government. The president is their commander in chief. Do they 'suck' too?

We have elementary and secondary school education furnished by our government. It has it flaws, but we are afforded the opportunity.

We go to a food store and some of us have issues with the nutritional content, but we can inform ourselves what the nutritional content is by reading the government labels. We can trust that the food is safe to eat.

Social security checks get there every month.

The much maligned postal service will take a piece of paper from San Diego to someone's front door in New York in a couple of days. We remember the one broken CD case or Aunt Betty's damaged fruitcake in 1993, but how many thousands of pieces of mail do we get without problem?

I can go on. I'm sure we can point out imperfections in everything that the government is involved, but we are better for the basic effort. It succeeds in making our lives better the great majority of the time. It is less than perfect, but it is not going to get any better by shrugging our shoulders and letting it 'suck'.

This is a government of, by and for the people. If it sucks it is because of us. We have to obligate ourselves to make it better. The government is going to be as good as we make it. Your vision might not be my vision, but our struggle together will achieve the American vision.

The bottom line in the health care debate is "if you get sick, you'll be taken care". Being thirty something in the world is not where our health care belongs. We are Americans, we have to make our government do the better job. The vast majority of the time it does.