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What ails us? Fear of change

"L ET THE BUMS and lowlifes pay for health care the way I do," one of our readers wrote in a letter that appeared in these pages on Monday. "I'm a retired senior citizen."

Cartoon by Signe Wilkinson/Daily News
Cartoon by Signe Wilkinson/Daily NewsRead more

"L ET THE BUMS and lowlifes pay for health care the way I do," one of our readers wrote in a letter that appeared in these pages on Monday. "I'm a retired senior citizen."

But how does our reader pay for his health care? We called and found that he is on Medicare - that is, government-run health insurance that keeps his premiums low, won't drop him if he gets expensively sick, and is funded through payroll taxes of American workers under 65.

One of the most intriguing phenomena of the tumultuous national debate over health-care reform is this: Many of the same people chanting slogans against "government-run" health insurance are themselves receiving government-run health insurance - Medicare.

And they're hanging onto it for dear life: It's not rare for constituents to demand that Congress "keep the government out of my Medicare."

To be clear, nothing that has been proposed by President Obama or the Democrats in Congress is a single-payer, government-run health-care system like Medicare (we wish it were). Rather, it leaves the private-insurance system largely intact, but will offer people who don't get insurance through their employers a chance to choose a government-run plan from among several other private-insurance options. As the president repeats over and over, if you like your private insurance, you get to keep it.

The confusion over Medicare could be the result of three decades of political messaging that says government can't run anything right. But why has the attempt to reform the health-care system - which is, after all, what Obama and the Democrats promised to do - turned into a freewheeling brawl over: creeping socialism (or is it fascism?); "death panels" to decide which old people or disabled will be euthanized; government-mandated sex changes, or the Democratic Party's supposed resemblance to the Nazis?

(Attendees at an Obama town-hall meeting in New Hampshire yesterday were respectful, but Sen. Arlen Specter's appearance in Lebanon, Pa., a few hours before was the kind of shoutfest that has become too typical.)

There is (undenied) evidence that some of the shouting has been, shall we say, facilitated by corporate interests, lobbyists, and conservative talk-show hosts. But whether the protests are "AstroTurf" or genuine "grass-roots," bizarre claims appear to have tapped into real fear among many Americans.

Our guess: The profound changes represented not only by the election of a black president but also by the continuing demographic transformation of the country and the passing of the generational torch, is deeply troubling to some Americans. True health-care reform, if done right, will represent yet another big change. Fear makes some people cling to the status quo.

This is not new. Consider this warning about another proposed federal program: "[If this program passes] . . . we will awake to find that we have socialism . . . [and] we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children . . . what it once was like in America when men were free."

What danger prompted this warning? It was Medicare - and the doomsayer in 1961 was none other than Ronald Reagan.

Imagine if Reagan had succeeded in persuading the nation not to change. The consequences of avoiding change are just as dire now.

This is what Obama should be saying: If you like the private insurance you have now, you won't get to keep it, not without health-care reform. Right now, 14,000 Americans a day are losing the insurance they have.

The status quo already isn't working for us, and without change - big, sometimes frightening change - it will get even worse.