Gimme Some of That Old-Time Socialism

By ART CULLEN

Seeing all those bags and hapless holiday travelers stacked up in Chicago and Denver made me think that a little bit of regulation and socialism won’t turn us into Cuba.

Flying was more expensive before deregulation, but you got there with your bags. You got a free cocktail with a little hot meal. Everyone was not snarling at one another. Ozark could get you from Sioux City just about to anywhere. The cost made it exotic. You only flew if you were bound for Hawaii. You did not fly to Vegas for the weekend unless you could afford the gambling.

More expensive isn’t all bad when it comes to regulating needless travel. Most of the people stuck in the airport didn’t actually need to be there with kids and dogs in tow. Deregulation made us accustomed to the most inefficient, environmentally bad form of travel. Cost-cutting made the whole experience degrading and dysfunctional. We accept that the TSA can probe, scan and search us, but we do not demand that airlines deliver us as they promised.

You could watch it in real time on TV at the doctor’s office. I thought I was dying, as is my manner, and thought it would be better here than in the Dallas airport. My physician told me after amazingly fast tests, and with good cheer, that there is nothing wrong with me that a good walk couldn’t cure.

Since I am on Medicare, the office visit cost me nothing. I called that morning thinking that persistent lower back pain was a sure sign of terminal kidney disease. The friendly receptionist told me I could come in that afternoon. This is at United Community Health Center, a construct of socialized medicine launched and supported with federal funding to fill care gaps that the private market did not.

Here, most of the health care bills are paid by Medicare or Medicaid. The doctors all live well. There is no evidence that Medicare for all would ration care. To the contrary, I visit the clinic more often now and use preventative screening more than I did when I labored under private health insurance. Our insurance rates typically rose by double digits annually — 44% one year, 58% another year, 78% the worst. What can you do when one company dominates the Iowa market? Health insurance costs suck our little newspaper dry.

Iowa’s Medicaid program was not made more efficient by turning it over to a couple private health insurance companies. Dozens of rural nursing homes have had to close. Health care providers say they are getting shorted on payments. We can use some more socialism in our health care — my experience with it is the bee’s knees, and I loathe seeing a doctor.

It is a religious tenet in Iowa that agriculture shall not be regulated. It might be in the Book of Genesis. The state supreme court says so. The federal court says so. When we had a set-aside we had more farmers buying pickups and a clean Raccoon River. More pheasants, too. You give up 10% of your marginal acres to grass in return for a subsidy. Reduced acreage leads to higher corn prices. You prevent downstream problems, like suffocating the Gulf of Mexico. But it gets in the way of capital that wants to seize every last acre. The result is in the ledgers since we won the Freedom to Farm under the Reagan Administration — half as many now as then. Fonda or Early are no better off for it. At least the markets are unfettered. That’s what matters.

We used to regulate the purchase and use of guns. Now we are arming the school staff in Cherokee and Spirit Lake. Some limits seem to be in order.

Another quaint practice: We used to put limits on speech under broad protections outlined in the First Amendment. Editors regulated the debate, and tried to contain the universe to a semblance of fact. It worked pretty well in Iowa for better than a century. Now, social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and TikTok are not regulated. They are not liable for what libels or treasons are published on their platform, as newspapers, television and radio are. The result has been a breakdown in civil society and a dangerous explosion of sheer ignorance — bleach might cure COVID, and you should storm the capitol on Jan. 6. Nobody is seriously talking about making these huge companies (TikTok is owned by China, Inc.) liable for what they publish, which flies in the face of centuries of common and written law.

Of course, the trick is finding the balance. At the Havana airport, garbage bags covered the men’s urinals and you never knew if that airplane ever would take off. Denver is better. You don’t want freeloaders like me overwhelming the doctor with imaginary kidney failure, but none of the medical folks around here are living in a single-wide from their government reimbursements and they don’t have to deliver babies if they don’t want to. We could afford to plant some more grass in place of corn for the sake of the river and maybe even the planet, while keeping Old McDonald on his farm. I’m sure most people at Chicago Midway Airport on Christmas Day wished that Secretary Pete would kick some hiney but that is nostalgic for a bygone time, we are resigned to suppose.

Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, February 1, 2023

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