He Feels Their Pain

And well he might, having been witness to his own mother's fears of being able to afford the medications and treatment she required, trying to battle her mortal bouts with cancer. He is a man committed to social justice. And attempting to fulfill his vision of social justice in the country whose highest executive station he achieved through the ballot box of popular opinion. He promised his countrymen that with his help they could achieve anything they set out to do. Yes, they could, and he would help them.

He has helped them in ways, up to now, they could scarcely have conceived they and their country would be facing up to. A great economic collapse of their free enterprise financial system, inadequately overseen, and vastly out of control. Americans are now experiencing unemployment at a rate no one might have anticipated during the time of the last election. Nor did anyone ever think, in the United States, that the engine of their automative industry would be truncated to the degree that has occurred.

Much less that the public would inherit a substantial portion of the assets and future of that industry. Nor that the public would take unto itself a tremendous burden of future debt in an effort to stimulate a horribly wounded economy. And who among them ever imagined that in quitting Iraq they would once again take on Afghanistan with the nightmare of battling irregular 'insurgents' only becoming increasingly and morbidly dangerous?

So here is the promise to give America's people the kind of health care system any caring and just industrialized state should provide for the protection of their people's health and longevity. That 15% of the population unable to afford to buy into their own health insurance package now to be covered by the state, finally. Fully 70% of the electorate waits with bated breath, in support of their president's health initiative.

For with steadily growing unemployment and the loss of health benefits, the number of people uninsured, not covered for basic health coverage is growing. Job insecurity has added to the troubles in the United States, sending consumer confidence plunging, and with it hopes of a speedier economic recovery. This is not a very good time, economically, to launch another expensive universal program for the country.

But there has never been a good time to do just that, according to the more fiscally conservative types who themselves have never had to worry about their own health coverage. Now President Obama has to turn the vaunted American free enterprise system on its head, hitting health insurance companies where their bottom dollar drops. And in attempting to improve preventive care he comes up against American social values.

Or lack thereof, with the mass marketing and acceptance of convenience foods that bear little nutritional resemblance to real food. The eager and ongoing consumption of food products that have been so utterly adulterated with chemicals, high fat content, sugar and salt have impacted deleteriously on the health of Americans. This is where obesity sets in. And the morbidly obese population is growing incrementally.

Lack of proper nutrition, lack of motivation to exercise, a love affair with the automobile have all inextricably combined to produce a population assailed as never before with ill health which medical science can tend to, but the cost to do so has crippled the resources of an already-unhealthy economy.

What a miserable spiral. And good luck.