(This article also appeared on the website of the Jackson, MS Free Press)

This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle

One hears: "Why should I have to pay for health care for people who don't take care of themselves?"

Nothing defines the difference between the world views of the conservative right versus the progressive left more: the idea that individuals are solely responsible for themselves versus believing we have a shared responsibility for the communities and societies in which we live.

Progressives would agree with conservatives that our personal failures and successes are determined by how we've applied our blessings or faced our trials within this life. But progressives recognize that our personal achievement also depends on powerful factors like our inherent luck, the support we have from those around us and the benefits provided by our communities. We see access to affordable health care in this light.

This article originally appeared at the website of the Jackson Free Press (Jackson, MS)

Today, many of us know someone who has no health insurance and we worry about what would happen if they got seriously sick.  Early last year a friend was diagnosed with cancer.  Fortunately he had an excellent outcome with treatment.  But two months later, he lost his job and -- after he and his wife struggled to keep up with the insurance payments for 8 months while he searched for a new job --they finally stopped paying for insurance. The choice came down to keeping a roof over their heads or paying their COBRA bill.  They know they are now playing the lottery with his health.  And God forbid his wife or son gets sick.  This is the dilemma too many of our families, our friends and our neighbors are facing right now.

Sara Robinson has a couple of very interesting posts that delve into the major differences between conservative and liberal philosophies. Her first post goes into how differently conservatives and liberals view discipline, accountability, responsibility and punishment.

Thirty years of conservative misrule have muddled Americans' understanding of words like responsibility, accountability, discipline, and punishment to the point where nobody knows what they mean any more—and don't seem to want to know, either. The social conservatives go on and on about the evils of postmodern morality and situational ethics; and on this score, I can't quite summon myself to disagree. It's been as though nobody on Planet Washington ever had a parent who was able to explain right from wrong, or demonstrate the role cause-and-effect plays in the ethical universe. It's like a moral-gravity-free zone.

Our economic crisis has called into question our current form of capitalism. Since the days of Reagan, the orthodox belief has been the market always worked better than government. Even more pernicious was the belief that the society worked best when the best were given free reign to accumulate more wealth. In fact, the bottomline for how our society was doing was based on how many billionaires we had because they were the cream of the society. So even while the United States was touted as the richest country in the world, for the bottom 50% of Americans, their lives were becoming harder as they paid more for everything that mattered: their housing, their food, their healthcare, their education, and their time. And for most Americans, if they were unlucky, they could lose everything if someone in the family got sick. But you know, we don't have to worship the false god of wealth trumping all other values.

One area of consensus for economists is the belief that things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. As John Mauldin points out in his news letter, a number of economic factors are working together that need to change before we will see any improvement:

Thomas Frank's latest book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, provides a comprehensive review of the conservative movement from the heady days of Reagan's first term to the later years of conservative misrule under George W Bush. Frank uses the story of Jack Abramoff, corrupt lobbyist, to illustrate the philosophy of the conservative true believers and the trail of wreckage they have left during their time in power.