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Helping Ourselves
On the question of reforming healthcare, I’m with the solid majority of Americans who would like to see a public option in addition to the other necessary reforms. I want to put that at the front of this blog so that the rest is not misunderstood. The success of the various forms of socialized medicine through much of Europe in raising the quality of life—particularly for the middle class and the working (and non-working) poor—makes it a no-brainer for me.
That said, the middle and lower classes in America need to help themselves—one way they could do so is to bring the same level of passion (though not the same kind of passion) to the health care debate as the minority who have been fighting against it by aping the scare tactics the right-wing shills have been feeding them. But that’s not my topic here today. No, as much as I think the politicians in Washington need to follow the will of the people and give us a health-care system in which both preventative care and the vast array of treatments are available to all, many Americans also need to help themselves to the extent that they can.
I don’t mean this in the callous way that one Republican congressman in a town-hall meeting suggested that “the community” should help a woman dying of cancer (what, with bake sales to pay her hospital bills? With Joe the Barber performing surgery?). I recognize that medical problems can bankrupt individuals and families through no real fault of their own. At the same time, when the nation’s savings rate is and has been negative [find statistics and re-write this], that suggests to me that we as individuals could be doing more to help ourselves.
I’ll start with an extreme example. When our grandmother died, my half-brothers and I received a few thousand dollars from her estate. One of them, despite having borrowed money from friends and relatives—to say nothing of “official” debt on the books—went out and made down-payments on several big items: a truck and a nice TV come to mind. You can guess what happened next, right? Of course he couldn’t make the payments and these things were repossessed or dragged him ever deeper into debt.
Not every American is so irresponsible, but it sets a pattern. I’ll give you another real example that’s less extreme: another of my half-brothers borrowed money from my parents to buy a house. He and his wife also had quite a bit of other debt. Nonetheless, they had better-than-basic cable (my parents, to whom they owed money, still had an antenna) and could go to Cedar Point (which has never been a terribly cheap amusement park) fairly often, including a week after asking to borrow more money from my parents.
Our parents and grandparents, living through the Great Depression, may occasionally have borrowed from others to make ends meet, but they didn’t make debt a way of life. To some extent they couldn’t, of course, because debt was not so readily available then as it is now. They simply had to make do with less, and I suspect they were better off for it. After living frugally through the recession, both my maternal and paternal grandparents eventually did quite well financially. In part, I suspect this is because living through the Depression without the dubious benefit of easy credit forced them to come to a true understanding of what is necessary and what is not and built the habits within them that built wealth when times were not so lean. Over the last 30 or 40 years, when times have not been lean many Americans have developed habits that build wealth for banks and credit card companies and let them live like they’re wealthy, if only for a time. Ultimately, though, the piper has to be paid, and bankruptcy is not as easy of a way out as it might appear. This comfortable relationship with debt has also been a recipe for impoverishing the next generation both by failing to have wealth to pass down and by teaching them the same bad financial habits that got their parents into this mess.
We need instead to learn to make do with less, to delay gratification, to live within our means in order that our means may become greater. By doing so, we also make ourselves less vulnerable to whatever hardships life will throw at us, from healthcare costs to economic hardships. Not invulnerable—thus, we could still use healthcare reform even if every American family started living within its means—but certainly much more resilient.