Health Care: The Future Costs of the Afghanistan War

The pro-empire policies of the ruling elite have distorted our national priorities for 60 years. Finally, they have become too much to bear.

We can no longer permit American citizens to suffer and die because they can't get health care. The condition of our collapsing infrastructure courts catastrophe. Our schools and our prisons have become warehouses for people without futures.

Beginning now, federal revenues must be expended on programs and policies that increase national wealth and well-being. Profit can no longer be the sole measure of value. The role of national government must be redirected toward the common weal. But this will only happen if the American people make it happen.

We are engaged in two debates today that our leaders will try to keep separate. But they are not separate: in the short run, they are about how we will allocate scarce resources: in the roughest sense, we can't afford both universal health care and world dominance, and so we will be forced to choose. In the long run, we will decide who we are, a social democracy whose first priority is the well-being of its people or a corporatist oligarchy that uses the trappings of democracy to put the interests of a tiny minority ahead of the good of the country and of its people. As Jeff Ley writes, "The choice is clear: health care or warfare; the Common Good or Common Destruction."

On Wednesday, President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress on health care. Later this year, he will decide whether to deploy additional troops to the war in Afghanistan on top of the 69,000 troops already deployed. The struggle for health care and the struggle to end warfare are inextricably linked. The cost for substantive (though imperfect) health care reform, as envisioned in the House of Representatives approach (with the public option), is projected to average $100 billion per year for the next ten years. The cost to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are projected to cost anywhere from $55 billion to $100 billion a year, with a few modest reductions to the baseline military budget, and the difference is paid.

The rest of the story: Health Care vs. Warfare: The Future Costs of the Afghanistan War by Jeff Leys (truthout 2009-09-12).