Over the summer, when the U.S. government said it would take a trillion dollars to cover 30 million people who don't have health insurance, lots of Americans complained loudly. Too much money!
We've heard a lot less noise about spending a trillion dollars to kill thousands of people -- including our own citizens -- in wars we didn't need to fight. The Washington Post has estimated the cost of the Iraq war at $3 trillion; a group called the National Priorities Project keeps a freaky running calculator (it moves so fast you can't really look at it or it'll give you a headache) that suggests we'll hit a trillion any day now.
As one of the founders of Physicians for Social Responsibility
and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Dr. Victor Sidel can lay claim to a sliver of the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize (don't laugh, newly minted NPP mockers; we haven't had a nuclear war, have we?).
have been done in the U.S. and around the world with that money."
He cites recent estimates that 45,000 people die every year because they don't have health insurance. "This could easily have been resolved if some of this money had not been spent on war but instead on health care," Sidel says. "One of the main things in protecting health is making sure that people can earn a living; if the money we spent on war had been put into areas like education, transportation, construction -- it would have produced many more jobs than by putting it into military spending."
Why talk about all of this now?
"The health-care debate and analysis of the ongoing wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan have often failed to examine how profit motives influence
public policy at the expense of citizens' interests," says Ira Harritt,
one of the event's organizers.
According to the National Priorities Project's calculations, Missouri
taxpayers have spent more than $2.5 billion and Kansas taxpayers are
out more than $1.3 billion on the Afghanistan war. Organizers say that
could have bought a year's worth of health insurance for almost a
million Missourians and 400,000 Kansans.
Other speakers include familiar hometown thinkers Carole McArthur, a UMKC professor of medicine; Judy Ancel, director of the Institute for Labor Studies; and the Rev. Vern Barnett, one of the Star's Faith-section columnists.
The forum is Sunday, October 18, from 3 to 5 p.m. at Community Christian Church, 4601 Main. More info here.
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