To see how ideology and politics sometimes works against the interests of the very folks politicians are elected to represent, the efforts to provide health care for U.S. citizens by diverse figures in American politics over the past 90-plus years serves as a great example.

While some today are saying health care reform is being rushed, the idea of providing coverage for all Americans has been around for longer than many of us have been alive. In 1915, a committee that included Louis Brandeis, Jane Addams and Woodrow Wilson helped get Workman’s Compensation legislation passed in more than a dozen states. The following year, the same committee drafted legislation providing for universal coverage. It was hopeful that universal coverage would enjoy the same success Workman’s Compensation enjoyed, so much so, the editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association said, “No other social movement in modern economic development is so pregnant with benefit to the public…”

The bill was fashioned after legislation that Otto von Bismark successfully enacted in Germany in 1883. The Bismark legislation is, in fact, the basis for our current practices of shared employer/employee cost for health insurance and sick pay, but at the time critics scuttled the bill as the “Prussianization of America.” The U.S. declared war on Germany in 1917, and anything “made in Germany” around that time was doomed to be reviled.

Flash forward to 2009 and we have entertainment ideologues, Glenn Beck for one, pushing the wildly inaccurate idea that current health care reform is “socialist” for including any form of public option. Beck’s whole schtick is entertainment, and like any entertainer, he plays to his audience. For instance, because part of Mao Zedong’s political philosophy happens to be true, and is quotable, Beck ignores Newt Gingrich’s reliance on quotes drawn from Mao, or General David Petraeus including Mao military insights in The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, while disingenuously deriding Obama administration officials as followers of Mao for using similar quotes in speeches.

The health care reform being debated now is not as Beck, or Palin, or Limbaugh claim, “socialist,” not even close. But those with the noisiest soapbox are often those who place elected representatives in positions where governing according to the best information and rational analysis is very difficult, often to the detriment of all.

Business interests have been in the same game. The energy industry has fought tooth and nail against developing alternative energy sources that threaten their bottom line. And in Maine, builders and contractors have been the chief opponents to common-sense residential sprinkler systems for fire safety. None other than Richard M. Nixon unsuccessfully sought to pass legislation that provided universal health coverage and employer mandates to cover employees.

And yet, here it is, 2009, and as Yale economist Irving Fisher said in 1916: “At present, the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without compulsory health insurance…” Thank the ideologues.

Steve Demetriou lives in Windham.