Oct. 29, 2009 (Arkansas Times) --
In the historic eruption of insanity and ignorance that has been the public health-care debate of 2008-09, the most nonsensical idea that surfaced was that the world would end if the government ever got into the business of insuring something.
For a while, it cropped up at town-hall forums all over the country, spurred by commercials and blogs engineered by the insurance industry and its fellow travelers.
"Ohmigod, what's our country coming to -- now the government is going to run health insurance!? screamed people who were insured by Medicare and the Veterans Administration or else longed for the day they could be.
People lose their senses in herds and regain them slowly, one by one, as a Scottish songwriter and journalist observed in a wonderful history of popular delusions composed after a long visit to America 150 years ago. Mercifully, the government-insurance hysteria seems to have subsided in most places except in the darkest precincts of Republican orthodoxy. Polls show that a vast majority of Americans favor the government offering health insurance to poorer working people, and big Democratic majorities in Washington now favor it.
One of the few places that the folly really seems to have taken hold is Arkansas, where the newspapers march to the same beat as Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. The two Arkansas lawmakers who found themselves at the center of the health debate in Washington owing to the accident of their committee assignments, Sen. Blanche Lincoln and Rep. Mike Ross, now seem so convinced that Arkansas voters are terrified of government insurance they have shrunk into a corner where they must vote against health reform that both have said was the nation's first order of business.
What pathetic irony it will be if Sen. Lincoln turns out to be the only Democrat in the Senate to support a filibuster to prevent a majority vote on health reform and perhaps is the person who brings down the health bill and along with it the president and her party. That from the state that produced Joe T. Robinson of Lonoke, the Senate majority leader who engineered the greatest insurance program in history, government or private -- Old Age, Survivors and Disability Insurance (to the teabaggers, that's Social Security) -- and Wilbur D. Mills of Kensett, who produced the next two, Medicare and Medicaid.
Yes, those are government insurance programs and sometimes even Sen. Lincoln brandishes them as marvels of government good works.
