Humans marvel when they study social animals. We are all taught as children that bees and ants and other animals have complex and predictable organized behavior that makes their groups behave almost as one functioning organism -- predictable, orderly and essentially healthy. We marvel when animals display grooming, caring and predictable service behavior to each other, and we cried back in the eighties when we read the books about the sign language-capable gorilla Koko grieving the loss of her adored companion kitten "Ball."

So "social" is good. Right. Every one wants a social life. Humans are born interacting and if given a chance will suckle soon after birth from the left breast of their mother where they can securely continue to have an ear up against the steady heartbeat they have been hearing before birth and drink the living food that has sustained infant health for all of history and pre-history as humans grew into their capacity for social being. That is the beginning of a social life. It is different from being separated from human contact in a padded plastic baby container sucking on a plastic object which is not necessarily connected to any warm human social embrace. Social is what humans need.

Social is also responsible. I respond to you, you respond to me. I take care of you, you take care of me. I take care of myself, you take care of myself...and our self-care sustains the group. Our health is part of our social life. By serving our own well being we help establish the health of the group, the community, the social web that creates a society. Too many sick people leave to few resources for people to reliably serve their community with basic work which provides for basic human needs.

My health is your health, my healing is your healing. We really all are in this together. When too many are sick the society is sick and too many resources are siphoned off to the "health care" realm, and the rest of the social fabric of the society can't work right.

American society is at a stage right now where it is increasingly difficult for people to be social in this broader sense. We are so stressed by financial, time, health and family demands that we have fewer personal resources for basic social interaction in community....the kind that makes life more secure, fun, happy and workable. Lots of people are barely getting by or are not getting by. This week's Nation magazine presented a piece by former NARAL president Kate Michelman, a woman from a family with "good" health insurance and a reasonable pension situation, who is now becoming destitute and completely at sea over how to deal with the devastating health care requirements of two of the three people in her immediate family.

There is no social network in America for responding to such a personal crisis except among the very few who have extremely high personal financial assets. No social structure exists in communities to help people who are losing their homes or going bankrupt because of debt for health care. This is true even for people who do have reasonably good health insurance. For the almost fifty million who have no health insurance, the choices are unimaginable for any of us who haven't been there, and are the definition of a loss of social life. People are on their own, there is no resource in most communities, except small scale personal fund raising campaigns, to even start to help people through the devastation of paying for care for catastrophic and long term catastrophic care.

Because of our profit-driven health care system, we have lost any coherent predictable social way of helping those in need of disease care. We have lost our social life when it comes to health care. It is in this broader sense that we need to "socialize health care."

This week is National Public Health Week. If my health is your health, and we really are all in this together, which is true, we need to cure our media language of the distortions and 1950' style rhetoric over the word "socialism"...and see it as a way of structuring society so that we are putting at least some of our common resources in to taking care of each other in a social way. I would far rather pay for your preventative health care and for community health promotion than pay for a senseless violent, chaos-producing war in the Middle East. How did it get to be that socialism to pay for the military is just fine for the Republicans, but social...ism...I take care of you, you take care of me...is unpatriotic and "bad" when it comes to health and healing? The answer is that it's not; we just have to positively redefine what socializing health care can mean.

I'm ready to take care of you. I'm ready to take care of myself and my community and help my community stay healthy. That is socializing human care. Maybe that's what social-ism can mean if we rethink and redefine that word in a new and positive way.

Sometime last year, I listened to an optimistic report over the radio, reporting that Pittsburgh didn't really need to worry about the demise of the steel industry because the health care industry there was doing so well and prospering in the form of major medical centers and facilities.

Well great I thought...that means the economy is thriving because Pittsburgh can serve tens of thousand of really sick people. Major medical centers, as opposed to community health centers and community hospitals have all the biggest, priciest, most profitable machinery. Now yes, illness and health problems are a part of life, but it's now basic to our economy that we are living unhealthy lives, becoming unhealthy and then feeding a parasitic, though sometimes life-saving , health care system that is one of the only thriving parts of the economy.

It's a basic truth of our economy that we are putting tens of billions of dollars into treating type II diabetes, an almost completely preventable disease, instead of devoting those dollars to education, child care, infrastructure repairs or other social basics. Multiply this times many preventable diseases and you have the picture of our bleeding economy, unable to take care of basic human needs for healthy living because it is patching up unhealthy lives with very very expensive technology-based disease care.

I respect and admire the many life-saving technology feats of modern medicine, and I am thankful that I have the privilege of access to them through the good fortune of excellent health insurance, but our lack of a basic prevention oriented approach is completely unsustainable.

Many working class teens now aspire to jobs in health care because it's one of the only truly safe sectors of the economy in which to find jobs. Again, this relies on millions of sick people turning up everyday to use the system.

Yesterday I had to wait for a prescription at my local chain drug store. I had to wait extra time because in twenty five years of living in this town I had never gotten a prescription drug, and had to be put in the computer and then they had to find my message lost somewhere in their phone intake system. Everyone behind the counter was completely overwhelmed. You would never know there was anything slow about the US economy from the activity going on behind this pharmacy counter. The clerks and cashiers were completely frazzled and beyond friendliness. The besieged pharmacist, who I'm sure thought he'd gone to pharmacy school to practice pharmacy, was spending most of his time on the phone with stressed-out customers...or with insurance companies trying to get prescriptions covered. This, he told me, is not what I expected when I went to pharmacy school. It's crazy he said.

"You know what's really crazy?" I asked. "It's crazy to watch obese, diseased people line up to buy bags full of prescription drugs for everyone in their family in the same shopping cart they are buying bags full of candy and other complete junk foods to celebrate the Easter holiday." I don't think it should be legal for the same store-corporation to make money from foods that contribute to the causes of diabetes (and other diseases) and also make money from expensive medicines that contribute to the medical treatment of diabetes and other diseases. "That's insane," I said. He laughed.

So...what can you do to reverse the worst aspects of our current economy? You can attempt the almost impossible, given the stress level, economic woes, lack of satisfying work, lack of exercise and poor quality of food that most Americans are living with these days: You can stay healthy and in doing so redirect the economy away from wasteful health care expenses toward the provision of basic human needs. You can eat healthy food every day, and even more importantly you can learn to grow food...wherever you are in whatever small way possible. Slow Food is important...but Grow Food is becoming increasingly essential. Oh, and exercise, and as May approaches you'll finally be able to get out in the sun and make some real Vitamin D.

In the meantime, when you do get sick, you should be provided with the best possible care regardless of your ability to pay because healthy care and disease care really are basic human rights, and until we get that straight, universally required insurance policies will never solve the problem of profit based "Health Care"...which is "good" for the economy numbers, and can save our lives in emergencies..... but does not necessarily promote our long term healing, health and well being.