By Oh Young-jin
City Editor
Great nations don't make a habit of missing opportunities. When they do, they are relegated into the league of ordinary nations, often with no prospect of regaining their power.
Unfortunately, the United States, a great nation for the better part of the 20th century, has been missing one great opportunity after another, and is seemingly going down the path of great nations of the past.
Its effort to reform health care poses an important test that will determine whether the U.S. can break from its habits and maintain its status as a great nation. However, the odds appear to be set against it.
Rescuing his country from the brink of financial collapse, President Obama was supposed to have the gratitude of the nation, winning the political capital necessary to reform its sick health care system. But instead, he is facing an angry nation that is blaming him for their woes and questioning his leadership over health care reform.
Few disagree that reform of the system is long overdue. According to the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the number of people uninsured during all or parts of 2007 and 2008 reached 86.7 million, about 30 percent of the population. Surely, the situation for 2009, the year of the Great Recession, was worse.
Besides, medical expenditures in the U.S. are rising at a faster clip than the growth rate of its economy, already accounting for 16 percent of the gross domestic product.
Simply put, the current U.S. health care system is a horror movie that has been brought to life. Nearly 100 million people live with the fear that, if stricken with a major illness, they may die because they are not covered. Meanwhile, the nation struggles from a fear of eventual bankruptcy unless the system is fixed.
These statistics may sit better in other countries, but not the U.S., which has long been a country of dreams for so many people around the world.
Conventional wisdom says that Obama's attempt to introduce a (nearly) universal health care system should receive strong popular support. But the Obama plan faces the same resistance that some of his predecessors faced in their botched attempts to fix the system because all health care reforms fundamentally require the forced transfer of wealth from haves to have-nots. In other words, those who are rich have to pay for the coverage for the poor in additional taxes or increased premiums.
Both houses of the U.S. Congress are divided along party lines, although they passed their versions of the health care bill late last year. Now, as required by the constitution, they are trying to reconcile their bills into a single mutually-endorsed piece of legislation. Complicating the matter is the election of Republican Scott Brown as senator, succeeding the late Ted Kennedy in the Democrats' stronghold state of Massachusetts. November's mid-term elections also make some Democrats reluctant to support the Obama plan.
But U.S. health care reform is not just a domestic issue but an international one being closely watched from the outside, as many in the international community want to gauge whether the U.S. can lead the world as it has in the past.
But what the outside world has seen so far is that the U.S. is once again missing a great opportunity.
For the past 20 years after the fall of Berlin Wall, the U.S. has been the sole superpower but has failed to capitalize on its status.
During the eight-year rule by former President George W. Bush, in particular, it antagonized much of the world that had looked to the U.S. for leadership. Of course, the Bush administration has a set of extenuating circumstances, including the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by Muslim terrorists. But, in hindsight, it was wrong for Bush to take the world on the warpath in what has since been revealed as a war of civilizations. After that, the world saw the U.S. not as a nation of peace but an aggressor.
Bush's wartime spending was supported by tax cuts under Republican rule, directly and indirectly providing the grounds for a subprime bubble economy that collapsed last year. Although the U.S. played a key role in stabilizing the world's economy in the aftermath, its status has been reduced to a shadow of its former self.
The U.S. is now looked at as an emperor who is unpopular with his subjects and shunned by his supporters, barely managing to hang on to power. China, which has been waiting for its turn at global hegemony, is closing in on snatching the emperor's crown.
The only hope left for the U.S. lies with Obama, who pulled the country out of a crisis but is facing popular rejection as seen with Winston Churchill at the end of the Second World War.
Britons may well have ditched Churchill because the war was over. But for U.S., its war is still unfinished.
To the outside world, it looks odd for a nation in crisis not to realize how deep its troubles are and rally around its leader. This often was the case with past great powers before being ousted from the throne. The U.S. health reform debate is not about numbers and partisanship but about the fate of the U.S. as a nation.