There’s a big difference between being a luddite, an anachronist, and belonging to that group of people who simply believe that going backwards can sustain a democracy. I just happen to believe that every knick-knack and technological advance we embrace exerts a price upon a society that we don’t always understand as we rush pell mell to incorporate them into our ever more busy lives.

But thinking backwards, and in fear, resistant to the fact and certainty of our world, has led to the dogma embraced by the New Conservative Neanderthal Party (NCNP), formerly the Republicans.

The Backwards Doctrine.  
Protect the rich at the expense of the poor. Eliminate cumbersome labor unions and environmental regulations at the expense of the working class and all citizens. Protect a system of food delivery that promotes profit over public health. Protect the House of Cards on Wall Street and its ambiguous financial strategies that have shifted from cultivating long-term relationships with their customers to money trading where short term greed is rewarded. Eliminate health care for all citizens. Work to reduce and eliminate public education. Work to reduce or eliminate tax revenue that pays for public infrastructure. Spend nearly a third of all government revenue to protect the nation against the boogeyman.

Then call it progress.  
There are a whole lot of people who apparently believe that backwards is the way to go forward.

That’s an odd proposition.
Backwards is forward.
Orwell described that notion
of sovereignty in his book 1984.

In Mexico where the population is covered by a health care plan called Seguro Popular, or popular insurance, it seems strangely ironic that misguided Americans like shiny-haired Ted Cruz are cheering on the efforts to defund the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare.

Granted, the present reading of the law is a lukewarm effort to provide health care for all Americans while still operating within a for-profit system which has created a gerrymandered system of hopes and wishes. Socialized medicine it is not. Universal health care it is not. A step in the right direction, perhaps. Karl Marx would be laughing at this branding of health care as socialism.   

In Mexico all citizens are covered under a free market universal system. Mexico is a land of abject poverty and untold riches, a land where public education is nonexistent. Still, the nation provides universal health care coverage for all citizens, including 100 percent coverage to all children under 5. For the working class, the program is a mixture of funding sources that include an affordable social security-type investment by both the individual worker and the employer, supplemented by government revenue. The program provides 95 percent coverage for secondary care and all catastrophic care, meaning few, if any, Mexicans will be bankrupted by an overburden of costs. The system is trying to move quickly from curative care to preventive care as it upgrades hospital and clinic infrastructure.  

The program is subsidized by tax revenues and is expected to be sustainable for at least the next 30 years as the government looks at ways to push that horizon farther into the future. I did mention that Seguro Popular is based on a free market system, meaning medical personnel are in private practice not in government practice, though it appears as though there is some public delivery of health care in rural areas not accessible to the wider health care system.

The cost of the delivery of health care in Mexico hasn’t been on the same 30-year unchecked free market upward exponential trajectory that has been experienced in the US. A poorer population south of the border simply won’t allow the huge profits that have driven costs skyward in America.

No matter what the Tea Party followers believe, the government hasn’t caused the huge increases in US health care costs, the free market has. Simple math says that as the Mexican population slowly experiences income growth, the part the government will play will be to keep costs within the reach of the revenues that are generated to keep the system sustainable.

That appears to be a no-no in this nation. That’s just the way it is when nearly half the population believes in the Backwards Doctrine. According to health minister Salomon Chertorivski the Mexican model sees the delivery of health care not in terms of cost but in terms of an investment in its people.

Not so in this advanced nation, where health care is seen like any other commodity, like a bag of potato chips or a flat screen TV. If you have the money in your pocket, buy it. Maybe put it on the credit card. If you don’t have the money that’s your problem so deal with it. And we wonder why our public infrastructure is eroding before our eyes.

Firm believers in the Backwards Doctrine are too busy looking backwards to see what’s right in front of them.