All I’m sayin’ is...

Actually, it’s not saying... It’s a question.  Where do these citizens of my country come from who hold a Bible in one hand and an automatic rifle in the other while attempting with a straight (no pun intended) face to explain why it’s a good thing to abandon the very poorest Americans in their helplessness?  How can they reconcile their allegiance to religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus with their avowed determination to eliminate programs which provide basic social services to the poorest Americans?   

As our country skidded to a stop barely in time to keep from plunging over a fiscal cliff today, my least favorite senator, Ted Cruz, was quick to apologize to extreme right Tea Party supporters for his “failure” to block the Senate’s vote for a bill to avoid national and international economic catastrophe. The guy wanted the catastrophe to happen. He’s apparently from the same camp as those folks who long for armageddon, for the end times, for the rapture. The Affordable Care Act has been his primary target, but his determination to dismantle all social service entitlements is an often expressed larger goal of the Tea Party caucus of the Republican Party.  Surely he knows that the financial cost to the United States of the prolonged crisis which he and his Tea Party colleagues manufactured is just about the same as the cost to the country of “cleaning up” after a major hurricane.  

Everybody knows Ted Cruz is very smart.  A graduate of Houston’s Second Baptist High School, Princeton University, and Harvard Law School, Senator Cruz could be a powerful force for good. He has impressive university education built on what presumably is a base of Christian ethics learned in a Southern Baptist secondary school.  It isn’t possible that he doesn’t know about excellent models for national health care programs out there in the world that provide good coverage for everybody at a less per-citizen cost than we have been paying in the United States for a system that hasn’t worked.  Take a look, for example, at Germany’s health system... or Canada’s or The Netherlands’.  Instead of committing himself to the task he and his colleagues were elected to do, to create a program that actually aims to provide health care for all Americans, he and his party have waged war against the Affordable Care Act, which was enacted by a previous Congress as an honest effort to meet health care needs of all Americans.    Of course, there will be unscrupulous practitioners who will try to game the system for profit. The program will require some revision. Most programs require changes as they are evaluated in their first months and even after some years.