It is truly amazing that the future of health care in the U.S. will be determined by the opinion of the Supreme Court concerning the meaning of our 236 year old Constitution.

Surely, the Founding Fathers who argued over Article One, Section Eight, which includes the Commerce Clause, could not have foreseen that their concern with regulating trade between the colonial states, the Indians and foreign powers, would one day be used to deprive a sigificant minority of Amerians of health care.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the United States is unique among nations in being governed by an ancient document.  Americans are made to worship the stability of their system of government, contrasted to the succession of constitutions that have typified other nations.  But there comes a point where ‘stability’ becomes paralysis. The campaign to amend the Constitution so that it reflects the modern world should get a boost from the Supreme Court’s decision as to whether President Obama’s Affordable Care Act (known derogatorily as Obamacare) is constitutional – even if, by some miracle, it goes against the challengers.

The tendency of the mainstream media to pretend that anything the political establishment does is okay, is as damaging as its tendency to ignore political actions by other powers.  A couple of years ago I noted in this blog that then-President Putin was calling for the dollar to no longer be the world’s reserve currency.  Now the BRICS countries (the major emerging economies: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are holding their fourth annual summit in New Delhi, at which they are actually discussing the creation of alternatives to the Western dominated IMF and World Bank.

Such a project might have appeared as nothing more than a pipe-dream a few years ago, but the financial meltdown – better weathered by the BRICS countries than by the West, by the way – is making it ever more likely.

Stay tuned to places like France 24, (France’s English language service which still pronounces its name in French) RT, or Al-Jazeera – all of which you can find on the web – to know what’s really going on in a world where progressive change rather than paralyzing tradition is operating.

President Obama had several opportunities during the televised congressional discussions on health care, to correct emphatic assertions by Republicans that we have the best health care in the world. He failed to do so.

True, we may be on the cutting edge in the innovative, highly technical procedures required by world leaders, but according to the statistics provided in the anything-but-liberal Economist’s yearly Pocket World in Figures, the United States is in 41st place among the almost two hundred countries of the world when it comes to life expectancy (two places behind Cuba, by the way).

When it comes to infant mortality, we are not among the lowest twenty-five, and we are in third place when it comes to obesity among men, eighth place among women. We are not among the eighteen countries that have the lowest number of population per doctor (Cuba comes in second, and among the industrialized countries on the list are Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, Israel, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands and Austria.) Obviously, some countries who have more doctors per head may not provide optimum care, such as Russia or Greece, but the fact that the United States spends roughly one and a half times as much as the members of the European Union should be broadcast more widely than it is.

Obama’s failure to rebut affirmations that we have the best health care in the world is not only a failure of honesty. It strengthens the position of those who believe that the main problem with our health care system is its cost. Low numbers in favor of major reform include those who consider single payer to be the only solution, and those who, when false affirmations are aloud to stand, say: “If our health care is ‘the best’, we could allow ourselves to spend less without putting the health of the population in danger, right?