With the usual lack of reverence for life when dealing with the living, right wing hysteria directed against health care threatens our entire population, especially the young. On the verge of a flu epidemic that attacks the youth most viciously, the right wingers in town hall meetings are fighting frantically to beat back the health care we need.

The question of costs, most vocal in the teabagging population, is an artificial one. The other nations of the industrialized world have much better health, while the U.S. leads in infant mortality and general decrepitude of our population. The threat that the right wing sees to our youth is one of the pocketbook, obscuring the very real threat of illness and death from, for example, the flu epidemic that is imminent.

Our health care system depends on insured patients, and the U.S. family of working people often has too little, or none. The H1N1 virus has proved most deadly to the young, and colleges are at the beginning of massive flu outbreaks as student bodies return to classes.

Outbreaks among sports teams who came together in preseason are already sweeping the continent, and games are being canceled. This week saw the general student population gather, with outbreaks in that population already underway. There is no capacity to handle the situation, and no health care system ready for it.

In 18% of hospitals, registered nurses report that other nurses have become infected, and one California nurse has already died from H1N1 flu.

With a situation as dire as this one promises to become, what is our right wing doing? The extremists are fighting against health care under the flimsiest of excuses, most vociferously because of the threat of ‘takeover by government’ of a health care system that at the moment is dominated by profit at the expense of actual care.

Last night on Bill Moyers’ Journal, a deep look was given at the waste that predominates in a system that’s about to be called on to save lives while its major concern is preserving profits:

MAGGIE MAHAR: After World War II, while other countries let their government begin to intervene in health care to make sure everyone got care, to regulate it to make sure it was good care, in this country doctors very, very strongly opposed any government involvement or anyone being involved in telling a doctor what to do. After Medicare was passed in 1965, elderly patients were getting far more care than they had been before then.

Then that’s when our industrial medical complex, I would say, took off. By the early 70s, there were so much money involved that suddenly people began to say, "You know what? Medicine is too important to be managed by doctors. We all know doctors are bad managers. What we need are businessmen managing health care." And that’s when health care went from being physician centered and controlled, to a large degree, by doctors to being controlled by the corporation and the CEOs of those corporations.

And, over time, more and more the CEO of the Hospital would not even be somebody with a MD. He would be somebody with a MBA. And CEOs bent on growth, bent on higher quarterly earnings, quarter after quarter, and year after year, are always pushing for more sales, more revenues, more and more and more. It produces more. But more may not be better for our health.

DR. DONALD BERWICK: I’ve heard it said that the official bird of health care is a crane. Look around at any hospital in your community there’s a crane on top adding rooms. You know, we just, we overbuilt it. And then, having overbuilt it, we use it and then we think using it is necessary. It’s a spiral.

RASHI FEIN: The worst thing that could happen to a director of a hospital is that everybody, all of the sudden, would be healthy. I’m not saying that he’s overjoyed when there’s an epidemic. Clearly, he isn’t. I’m not saying that he’s overjoyed when people are sick. Clearly, they’re decent folks. But they’re running something where what they are selling is hospital beds.

MAGGIE MAHAR: If you can believe it, Rashi Fein has survived 5 decades of the battle for health care reform. In 1953 he served on President Truman’s commission on the health needs of America at a time when Truman was pushing for universal coverage. Then he worked with JFK when he fought unsuccessfully for Medicare, a battle that LBJ would later win. As a professor of medical economics at Harvard, Fein has never given up. He firmly believes that medicine should not be all about money. As he puts it, "We live in a society not just in an economy."

RASHI FEIN: Well, we spend more than any other country and we spend a higher percentage of our gross domestic product and our gross domestic product is larger than most other countries’. So we are spending per capita one heck of a lot more than anybody else, which ought to be disturbing, if only because there are lots of other things we could be doing with money. We could have more money for education or more money for infrastructure or more money for bridges and transportation or we could put money into high- speed trains or we could have tax cuts.

On the other hand somebody could say, "Well, we have chosen to spend money on health care and that’s also a good thing." True. But interestingly, disturbingly, frighteningly, pick your own word, we spend more money and we are not healthier. We don’t live longer. We don’t seem to be getting as much value for money.

LARRY CHURCHILL: It shouldn’t be any surprise that there is a huge disconnect between the amount of dollars that actually poured into health care and the health indicators of a population because this system was not designed to serve this end. That’s a fundamental realization that we need to come to. And until we do I think, you know, we’ll still be trying to tinker with the market in some kind of funny way. Just a little tweak or adjustment to make it work better, but it was never designed, actually, to meet health care needs.

The right wing has fought for decades against health care for this country, and they’ve had great success. Health for the U.S. is at a premium (pardon the pun), available only to the affluent. The premiums families pay are wasted in obscene executive salaries and equipment. Services are neglected for prevention, and are unaffordable to most when they are urgently needed.

Our youth are about to experience the effects of generations of obstruction to the well-being of this nation. The forces of the right must not be allowed to ‘bring it on’ in a fight against phantasms, when reality is about to take its toll on the whole country in the form of an epidemic that threatens to take the lives of, as well as beggar, huge numbers of the population.

It shouldn’t take a disaster of biblical proportions to wake the country up and inject some sanity into health care.