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Real Answers™
gjr92
Copyright: © 2010 Gregory J. Rummo
600 words

WE'RE ALL PRODIGALS WHEN IT COMES TO HEALTH-CARE REFORM

By: Gregory J. Rummo

Despite all of the complaints from the right that liberals play fast and loose with their agendas in order to get elected and the liberal mainstream media shills do a poor job of exposing this tendency, I still wonder if the Congress we have, awful as it is, is not simply a reflection of our own miserable selves.

We’re profligate spenders swimming in a sea of debt against a riptide of consumerism. I was reminded of this recently when a missionary friend of mine sent me a few photographs from Costa Rica of the 1993 Jeep Cherokee that we donated to his work almost 13 years ago when the odometer read 80,000 miles. He’s maintained the vehicle in perfect condition.  Despite driving it through the mountains and the jungle, it looks as if it just left the showroom. Since then, we are on our third family vehicle. 

We all know at least one person way in over his head financially with a mortgage, a home equity line of credit maxed out and a steady stream of monthly credit card statements sucking away whatever cash is left in minimum payments.

We put to shame the Prodigal Son who demanded that his father “give [him his] share of the estate” so he could go off and “squander… his wealth in wild living.”            

Amidst our ever insatiable entitlement mentality and a discontent with the former administration in the White House, one word—“change”—spoken a little more than a year ago was all that was necessary to tempt a nation of prodigals to embrace a man who promised the biggest give-away since the Great Society.

But something happened along the way from that promise to its recent fulfillment.

A lot of us woke up from our drunken stupor in the pigpen and realized we had been mistaken. In Virginia and Massachusetts and New Jersey and in thousands of other places where tea parties were held, we repented of our excesses and began the long journey home. But unlike the story of the Prodigal Son in the Bible, this dad wasn’t waiting expectantly for us to appear on the horizon with changed hearts.               

In this version, dad had stopped acting responsibly. He had become the prodigal. He pushed us away. He refused to listen. He even ridiculed us. He had decided that he was going to take our place and push ahead with his own plan for riotous living. After all, it was what we had wanted in the first place, or so we thought.

So now that the fatted calf has been slaughtered and it’s roasting in the oven, some can’t wait to sit down at the table to savor the first bite while others can’t open the windows fast enough to ventilate the stench from the kitchen.  

It’s not as if health care hasn’t needed reforms until now. Its problems; among them frivolous lawsuits, uncompetitive interstate barriers for insurance companies and Medicare fraud to name the most blatant didn’t just rear their ugly heads a year ago when President Obama was elected. 

This family feud could have been avoided had Republicans acted like a responsible father when they were in power, when they could have enacted their own health-care reform legislation to include some of the very measures mentioned above. That they only saw fit to offer them up in opposition to the Democrat’s plan because a gun was put to their heads makes them accountable in part for what has happened.  

Too bad they too were acting like prodigals.

Gregory J. Rummo is a businessman, journalist and the author of “The View from the Grass Roots,” and “The View from the Grass Roots – Another Look.” Contact him at GregRummo.com.

"Real Answers™" furnished courtesy of The Amy Foundation Internet Syndicate. To contact the author or The Amy Foundation, write or E-mail to: P. O. Box 16091, Lansing, MI 48901-6091; amyfoundtn@aol.com

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