What's possible for us in New Hampshire, and who decides?

"The truth is that national health insurance would make a huge difference for the people of this state, and for New Hampshire businesses." (Getty Images)

Earlier this year, during the height of town meeting season, the Concord Monitor reported that the health insurance bill for Bow and Dunbarton schools had jumped 16%.

"It's a part of the budget that we don't have any control over," Duane Ford, business administrator for SAU 67, told the Monitor's Sruthi Gopalakrishnan.

That is certainly true, and his district is not alone.

A week before the Monitor published its story, here's what reporter Corey McDonald of VTDigger wrote about the situation for one Vermont district: "Adam Bunting, the Champlain Valley School District superintendent, told lawmakers on the House and Senate education committees last month that health care costs at his district have grown by 40% over the last five years."

If you believe, as New Hampshire Republicans seem to, that this is the result of fiscal irresponsibility among our school districts, I invite you to explore your own household budget for clarity. You're likely to find something like what a KFF study in October revealed: Family premiums cost nearly $27,000 a year, with workers picking up an average of $6,850; employers, like our taxpayer-funded school districts, pick up the rest.

This is in part what I was getting at last week, when I wrote that towns and cities in New Hampshire are not to blame for high property taxes. I did not, however, mention health care costs specifically, but one reader emailed to say it was worth pointing out that national health insurance would go a long way toward easing New Hampshire's heavy property-tax burden.

"If you removed health insurance from these budgets," the reader wrote, "and it was replaced with a national health insurance tax, there would be nothing to bemoan."

While I'm not sure national health insurance would stop people from complaining about their property tax bills altogether — it's sort of a New Hampshire pastime — it's a strong point. I said as much in my response, but then suggested that until this country addressed how heavily corporations and special interests influence public policy it would remain a pipe dream. Such is the strength of the health care and pharmaceutical industry lobbies, just as the fossil fuel lobby is the main impediment to what should be universally desirable clean energy and a fighting chance against climate change.

My response to the reader was my honest opinion, based on countless conversations and political observations over the years, but my own words bothered me all the same. When did I become so cynical?

The truth is that national health insurance would make a huge difference for the people of this state, and for New Hampshire businesses. That alone makes it worth pushing for, no matter how steep the climb or how powerful the monied forces in opposition. And there are plenty of voices in this country still doing just that.

"I'm as capitalist as they get," small-business owner Gene Marks wrote recently in The Guardian. "But I've learned that government has a significant role in our lives, from providing defense to funding needed infrastructure. Providing health care to all through a national insurance system strengthens our economy's infrastructure."

If you can't see that truth in your own circumstances, how a more sensible and controllable system of health care in this country would stimulate your household economy, then I suppose congratulations are in order. You are part of the elite constituency being served by the Trump administration and its conservative proxies in the New Hampshire Legislature.

That would also mean, presumably, that you have a special understanding of why our president looks to the Dow Jones Industrial Average to determine the health of the American economy. The richest 1%, a club to which the Trump family gleefully belongs, own more than 50% of all stocks and mutual funds. If not for the boasts of our president, I wouldn't know (nor would I care) when the Dow hits 50,000.

My concerns are more liquid — "How much do we have in checking, and how much do we owe?" — and like most of you I do not know what it feels like to be insulated from policy. That is not a complaint, just an expression of my reality, which carries an assumption that your reality, while probably not identical, is likely similar.

National single-payer health care would be game-changing for New Hampshire, of that I have no doubt, but there's a reason I'm not getting too wonky about the details. We would need to have a national conversation about the cost, how we pay for it, and what the change would mean in real dollars for American families — and we would need to do all of that in isolation from a powerful lobby hell-bent on delivering higher and higher profits to its shareholders. That's a lot of work, so in the meantime it's critical that we refuse to allow entrenched political forces to define the parameters of the possible, both nationally and locally. We may be a million miles from Medicare for All, or reducing the influence of money in politics, or properly and fairly funding public education in New Hampshire, but that doesn't change the fact that our elected leaders, in theory, still work for and answer to us.

It is not irreparable brokenness that is fueling the epidemic of hopelessness in this state and country. The menu of solutions has just become too short, by design, and so every election season has become a voting exercise in choosing the best bad deal.

Maybe national health insurance is a moonshot, just as proper education funding appears to be in New Hampshire. But that's just cultivated cynicism and fear of change talking. And besides, when did we become so averse to the occasional moonshot?

I still see New Hampshire and the nation as fixer-uppers rather than tear-downs, despite what the well-heeled demolition crews in Concord and Washington say, in words and actions. And I also know this: The politicians who are having the most fun stripping everything down to the studs — and simultaneously bleeding the working class — have no intention of building anything when they're done. The blueprint flows in only one direction.

I know we can't fix any of this overnight, but we retain the power to instantly decide for ourselves what is possible and what isn't, and without any input at all from the protectors of profit.

If you're seeking a cure for the new American malaise, a little directed and stimulating hope is as good a place to start as any.

Courtesy of New Hampshire Bulletin