What Republicans used to be

When I was in grade school, in the late 1950s early 1960s, I benefited from one of the great medical achievements of the 20th century — the eradication of polio. I remember quite well being herded into the cafeteria of Madison Elementary School in Quincy, Ill., and receiving the Salk vaccination for polio. Every other student in the school, well-off or not, received the same vaccination because it was free and supplied by the government. I remember this especially because my dad, a country doctor and lifelong Republican, was administering this exercise in socialized medicine.

At the time, around 35,000 Americans were contracting polio each year, which meant that over an average lifespan, every American had about a 1.5 percent chance of being infected. If you had 1,000 acquaintances over a lifetime, 15 of them were likely to contract polio. Because of the vaccine, every generation following mine has been protected from this horrible affliction. Polio now hardly exists in the Western Hemisphere.

Would the current cadre of Republican legislators support a program of free universal vaccination? They would not, because their free-market ideology would veto any notion that eliminating a disease was worth the sacrifice of their principles. For them, the tens of millions of Americans who would contract this crippling disease would be collateral damage in the fight for a pure capitalist creed. And, being mostly decent men and women, I have no doubt that they would pity the sick.

When Dr. Jonas Salk was asked to patent his vaccine, which would certainly have brought him wealth beyond imagining, he declined because, “You can’t patent the sun.” The sun is a benefit, indeed an essential, to all. You can’t ration sunlight. You can’t decide who does or does not get sunlight. You can’t make people pay for sunlight.

This, of course, is what is at the root of the capitalist opposition to solar power and to universal health care. The sun can’t be privatized. “They” are attempting to prevent your use of the plentiful, free, benign energy of the sun because they can’t control it. They can’t turn this particular resource into a commodity.

Is health care a commodity or a right? It’s been a hot talking point for a long time. The Eisenhower administration, a Republican administration, felt that people had a right to be freed from the terrible consequences of infection and, with the help of the wonderful March of Dimes, dispensed this right freely. Later, Nixon supported national health care. And GOP Gov. Mitt Romney brought it to Massachusetts.

Republicans now, however, believe that one should bargain for health care. They think you should go to your doctor and make a deal: You cure me and I will give you a certain amount in return. Market forces under such an arrangement will set the price.

If you have children, what would you offer to have your child protected from polio, a disease that attacks children disproportionately? Five hundred dollars? Of course. Ten thousand dollars? Absolutely. In fact, I would have taken out a second mortgage to protect my son from polio. That is the unregulated, free-market capitalism that current Republicans espouse. But those darned 1950s Republicans (and Democrats) deprived pharmaceutical companies of their “right,” the right to let the invisible hand of the market decide which children lived and which died.

And here is how the health care bargaining system worked in my Republican dad’s medical practice. No one was ever turned away, but not everyone paid the same. For example, because he practiced in a rural community, he was paid not infrequently in, say, a bag of corn by a farmer for whom money was tight, or in an absolutely horrific hand-knitted sweater from a widow on a pension.

This isn’t to say that he wasn’t prosperous. He was. And if you want to analyze it, you could say that his well-off patients were subsidizing the health care of his needy patients, a tax they never knew they were paying. And you would be right. And on the other hand, you could say that a healthy community benefits everyone, and the subsidizers were getting their money’s worth by having a healthy workforce and population. And you would be right.

My dad was certainly smart enough to see the contradictions and know that “free” health care cost money. But for him, that was just talk — idiots talking ideology. In his political/medical sphere, he found a middle way that had nothing to with economic policy but had everything to do with being the practical son of a Methodist minister; he saw sick people and he helped them when he could. And to the laid-off man with a broken rib or the young couple with a baby with pneumonia, or even the Japanese mother in 1946 for whom he stole penicillin for her baby from his Air Force base pharmacy (a significant crime), his care was like sunlight. That was the Republican Party he represented.

Paul Johnson lives in Santa Fe.