I'm getting really tired of Obama's constant excuse that his health care plan isn't universal because "The reason Americans don't have health insurance isn't because they don't want it, it's because they can't afford it." The reason Americans don't all have flat screen televisions is because they can't afford those, too. But, normatively, we think everyone should have health care. So is Obama going to make health insurance free? A dollar? If not, then there will still be a class of folks for whom health insurance does not seem a good deal, and this class of folks will still need to be in the system, as they will still have accidents, and still contract catastrophic diseases. And, in a larger sense, it will still be true that our whole society should be covered, that we should embrace our capacity to come together and have the healthy aid the sick and the young aid the old and the rich aid the poor, all with the expectation that, one day when we are sick, or old, or poor, the luckier among us will help ease our burden. This is, I believe, absolutely core to progressivism.
And this was exactly the argument that, once upon a time, I thought Obama would be making. That we as a society needed to unify, come together, make temporary sacrifices to build a better world. When he said things like "We know that government can't solve all our problems - and we don't want it to. But we also know that there are some things we can't do on our own. We know that there are some things we do better together," I figured that this was the case for Obama: His remarkable eloquence rendered him uniquely able to articulate the larger progressive narrative, that our nation must move forward as "we," rather continuing on as a country of I's. That's what his appeal to unity meant -- not just that our politics would contain fewer dirty words, but that our polity would come together, because we, together, could create a better society than was possible on our own.
