Truth - Al Franken [122]
Dick Cheney, who, up until that day, had suffered a mere four heart attacks in his entire lifetime, managed to double that total in his forty-eight hours as president.
At long last, the country was united. Your namesake’s famous words, Barack, turned out to be half-right. There were no red states and blue states that day. Only blue states.
The fun was over. It was time to restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office, to usher in a new era of personal responsibility, and to leave no child behind—but this time, for real.
We Democrats had come to power in a nation and a world beset by problems. At home: unaffordable health care, job and retirement insecurity, crumbling schools, and a crippling addiction to foreign oil. Abroad, a disastrous war. Plus poverty, terrorism, tyranny, global warming, and epidemic disease. Also, a comet was hurtling toward the Earth.
But we were fortunate to have a president with a sweeping vision, and the wisdom and courage to make that vision a reality. On Tuesday, January 20, 2009, our new head of state delivered an inaugural address that moved America to tears of joy and hope. In stirring words that will never be forgotten, the President explained that from now on, instead of serving special interests, politics would serve the public interest. And in return, Americans would be challenged to meet a new standard of patriotism. I don’t remember exactly how it went, but it was unbelievably eloquent and moving. You can look it up.
The gist, basically, was that we were now in a global society full of great opportunities but also great risks. And that the job of America’s government was to shield people from those risks so they could seize those opportunities. Imagine that sentiment put in a very eloquent way. The President has a particular gift for that.
It was more than just rhetoric. In the first one hundred days, the President and the President’s allies in Congress, including your granddad, enacted one hundred pieces of legislation, all of them flowing from the one simple uniting idea that we are all in this together.
They were the hundred days that changed America.
Day 1. Universal health care. Would you believe that our universal health care system, the “fourth rail” of American politics, didn’t exist until 2009?
When your granddad started his radio show back in ’04, I thought the biggest problem in America was dishonesty in public discourse. I had spent a great deal of time and effort combating it. But as I learned, day by day, about all the problems facing our country, I started detecting a common thread. Whether it was the crisis in veterans’ benefits, the causes of bankruptcy, the pressure on corporate pensions, or the health of our nation, there was one root cause. It wasn’t Ann Coulter, as bad as she was. It was the fact that America, unlike every other developed nation in the world, didn’t guarantee that every one of its citizens would have access to health care.
At that time, America spent a far higher fraction of its income on health care than any other industrialized country, but got far less in return. In terms of health status and patient satisfaction, the U.S. was at the very bottom. And Americans were the fattest people on earth.
Why hadn’t we fixed the problem? It wasn’t that Americans didn’t want universal health care. For decades, opinion polls had showed that large majorities of Americans supported it. But since the 1940s, every time universal health care had been proposed, the special interests—the drug companies, the insurance companies, the for-profit hospitals owned by the Frist family—had killed it.
Now the game had changed. Government was finally aligned with the special-est interest of all: the people. And the people got what they wanted and needed.
This sent a message to the special interests: You’re not so damn special anymore. Get over yourselves.
The national health system saved America a mind-boggling amount of money and lives by adopting new information technology. The transition to a more high-tech system