Curbside Conversation

Roger misses his right leg. Cut off at the hip, he lost it when he slipped off a train somewhere in Wisconsin. That was five years ago. Now Roger lives in a rented garage in South Sacramento. There's no kitchen or bathroom, but he is glad to have a safe place to retreat to at night. He has a wheel chair to get around, although in the past he had an electric one. Someone stole it. Roger's birthday is October 7. During our curbside conversation today he said he will be 42 this year. While he was in the hospital recovering from losing his leg, the doctors told him he had diabetes. So now Roger has to take insulin every day.

Roger is one of 46 million Americans who live in poverty in this country. According to the latest census data, 1 out of every 6 persons in this country is poor. That's the highest rate since the U.S. Census Bureau began keeping track of income levels in the 1950s.

What's more, the Census Bureau claims "that unemployment benefits kept 3.2 million people out of poverty in 2010, and that Social Security retirement benefits did the same for nearly 14 million seniors." In short, without the help of the U.S. government, things would actually be much worse than they presently are right now.

In addition, just under 50 million Americans have no health insurance. It's likely that many of the same people who are in poverty also don't have health insurance. Furthermore, the census data tells us that nearly "25 million Americans who lack health insurance have pre-existing conditions such as heart disease and diabetes." So half of the people without healthcare coverage already have a pre-existing condition for which they need medical treatment.

There is at least one politician running for the office of President of the United States who implies that the American people should just let a person who doesn't have insurance die. The underlying concept behind this libertarian rhetoric is that individuals and civic organizations in society should care for those who can't care for themselves. Or, in a 21st century version of social Darwinism, the individual who cannot take care of himself (because he does not have healthcare insurance) and who cannot find others to care for him, pays the price of freedom by dying. This isn't just a dramatic rhetorical flourish by a presidential candidate, however. Reuters reports that 45,000 people died in the U.S. in 2009 because they didn't have health insurance.

Although unintentional, this would appear to be a round about endorsement of the individual mandate portion of President Obama's healthcare overhaul. The individual mandate requires all individuals have healthcare insurance.

But there's more. According to Bernie Sanders, based on data from a report generated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, "the United States has both the highest overall poverty rate and the highest childhood poverty rate of any major industrialized country on earth. This comes at a time when the U.S. also has the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth with the top 1 percent earning more than the bottom 50 percent." So one of the richest industrialized countries on earth also has the greatest amount of poverty on earth. How sadly unneccessary.

Back to Roger: he says he is a mechanic and he has lots of tools. The problem is cars have become more like computers than machines. Thus Roger's tools and car repair skills are becoming obsolete. He, like millions of other Americans, needs re-training in order to compete in a new global order.