“We live in the United States of Amnesia”

Gore Vidal said those words in the documentary Why We Fight. To me, it is the punchline to the question: What do you call the country that ignores the lessons of history and is doomed to repeat them?

Vidal was explaining why we don’t understand the animosity that people in the Mideast have for the U.S., even though our country has propped up dictators there (Sadam Hussein, Shah of Iran, Saudi Arabian princes) and funded warlords and guerrillas, including Osama bin Laden. In the film, when people were asked why we are fighting in Iraq, you got either a reflexive “for freedom” or a lot of stammering with an occasional “for the oil.”

There’s a lot of amnesia going on in the health care reform debate. Sen. Lamar Alexander says it’s just too darn hard to tackle the problems of an industry that accounts for 17 percent of our GDP. The last time Congress gave up when the going got tough, 1992, health care accounted for 13 percent of GDP. If we could cure Congress of amnesia, they might see that giving up only lets the problem get bigger.

And there is much hand-wringing over the nearly $940 billion, 10-year cost of the current proposal. Over the last ten years, health care spending has increased $1.1 trillion. You don’t even need an amnesia cure to know that $940 billion is an improvement over $1.1 trillion.

Opponents of current reform measures call it a government takeover. If they weren’t victims of amnesia, they would see that the current health care system is headed for a government takeover. Government share of health care spending has gone from 44 percent to 47 percent over the last 10 years, on pace to becoming a majority shareholder by the end of the next decade.