By Don Perdue

Guest Commentary

Inasmuch as it now looks like Congress has taken the easy way out, and opted not to enact Health Reform before it recesses, the question of where they are in the deliberations has now become the province of constituents at home with the telephone numbers and mailing addresses of otherwise absentee congressional representatives. In other words, they are Home and now we know where they are.

As the insurance, drug, and corporate medical lobbies continue to incite riot (just note the number of talking head articles in your local papers, the volume of the rants on talk radio, the cartoons so luridly displayed), it is not surprising that confusion has seemingly taken hold and (guess what) is rendering the required inertia to end the issue.

It is a familiar plan. Just buy time, get paid-for policy wonks and partisan media personalities to create doubt, then walk away suggesting that, “It isn’t clear what the People want, and, of course, I am with my People!”

Bull Cookies!

Our health care system is in a shambles. I know that someone who maybe hasn’t visited an emergency room recently, or tried to get an appointment with a specialist inside three months, or paid a $50 co-pay for a prescription drug selected by an insurance company, might say “Oh No! We have the greatest medical care in the world! This lunatic Perdue thinks it’s not so, and wants to make the United States a Socialist State!” To that person I again, say “Bull Cookies!”

First, the United States will never become a socialist state. Just as in the Bush Administration there was never a danger of our becoming a Totalitarian State, no matter who the president is or how so-called “liberal” Congress may be at a given time. That socialism talk is just Fear being substituted for Logic to win a debate on false grounds.

We may very well go bankrupt, throw our moral compass into the gutter with our money, and devolve into some sort of loosely connected bunch of fiefdoms with towers and barbed wire, but we won’t be wearing red underwear and parading off to the Gulag. Americans love Freedom far too much for that.

Second, unless we rein in the Madison Avenue-driven claptrap being paid for by those whose only real God is mammon, we risk the worst-case scenario. We could simply throw up our hands and do nothing, which, of course, is what they want. (It might be well for the Industries noted above to recall that the other most noteworthy characteristic of Americans is that they hate Losing almost as much as they love Freedom. I think, down the road, that might be important for them.)

Take a moment to clear your mind of all the scripted white noise surrounding health care reform. Sit down at your writing desk or kitchen table or at your computer or near the wall where the telephone hangs, call up the office of your Congressman or Senator, and tell them how you feel about it. Use short sentences and perhaps even shorter words. If you don’t get through to them personally, ask them to call you back.

Push back the “pull-back” by Congress. Retreat is not an option on this issue. We have done that before, and I would simply ask the question put so famously in a previous presidential campaign. As far as health care goes, “Are you better off now than in 1998?” Call them up. Send them an e-mail. Write. Tell them plainly. Erase any confusion in their minds. Tell them the bull cookies are piling up out here in America, and we don’t need that kind of fertilizer to grow angry. We already are.

Don Perdue is a Delegate in the West Virginia House representing the 17th District.