Quoting ...

A truly heartfelt comment on David Brooks' Tuesday column on Democrats celebrating the health-care bill's passage. It is not one of his most thoughtful.

LukeH
Park City, UT
March 23rd, 2010
10:50 am
Mr. Brooks, I have always admired your column as being the one person to tell it like it is, party and politics aside. Unlike you, I grew up in a household with admiration for conservatives and hoped one day I could vote for Republicans like my father. Even after suffering the death of my brother in Iraq, I still held true to Republican ideals. But slowly and surely my wall crumbled and gave way to the realization that the Republicans had blinded us like they have so many times before, and watching the blatant fear-mongering they have displayed during the health care debate has only driven that point home further.

You reference the health care bill along with the federal debt, but no one questioned how we would pay for the Iraq War, yet we went along with it — and the Iraq War was about taking lives; this is about saving lives. You state that you "admire the act of generosity, but you wish they had sold a few of the Mercedes to pay for it." Yet the Republicans succeeded, for the first time in history, on cutting taxes during a time of war — a war that needs to be paid for! You also state that the "task ahead is to save this country from stagnation and fiscal ruin." But what of the millions of Americans who every year face stagnation and fiscal ruin over health bills that they cannot pay?

I have been witness to a friend who could not afford to pay her hospital bill after a freak brain aneurysm. The hospital began to garnish her wages, leaving her unable to pay for her children's needs. Is she to be left out in the cold because of a freak accident?

It is high time this bill was passed. We treat health insurance as if it is a privilege, but then members of the religious right state that abortion is an abomination, that all babies have the right to live — then don't all humans have the same right to health insurance, to keep their right to live? health care is not about capitalism — it is about life ... and I would give anything to save one.

Brooks engages in some silliness, usually unlike him. For instance, he writes that American vibrancy "was nurtured by 19th-century Republicans who built the railroads and the land-grant colleges to weave free markets across great distances." As a reader in Austin, Texas, pointed out:

Didn't the federal government give land to the railroads to enable them to build these railroads across the great west? Were land-grant colleges not founded by the gift of federal land to the states (Morril Acts of 1862 and 1890)? Proof of the successful role government can play in creating the vibrant economy we all want.

The economic vibrancy you extoll resulted from these federal gifts both to railroad corporations and states.