Dear Readers and Friends,

In our quest to grow and evolve, we all run into obstacles. We meet resistance. Change proves stubborn and at times impossible. Anything that I can do to overcome these obstacles is a contribution I never wish to pass up.

In my new book I address the most difficult obstacle of all: the body.

It would be difficult to imagine a more eloquent and timely case for health care reform than the one being made by Barack Obama. He has staked his early presidency on fulfilling one of his major campaign promises. Everyone agrees — not counting extremists — that his recent address to Congress was masterful. Yet an ABC poll quickly showed that 78% of respondents don’t believe the President’s proposed reforms will help them personally, and over 80% don’t believe it will lower their costs.

This fix-it President, who also has the gift of eloquence and an electoral mandate, has hit a wall. That wall has more to do with the future than just health care.

Like most people, I was encouraged and energized by President Obama’s stirring speech to Congress last week. With rare candor, he told the truth about the three C’s of reform: costs, coverage, and character. The last C was the most emotionally charged. Staring lawmakers and citizens in the eye, the President essentially said, “Is America a society that squanders $900 billion on a dishonest war but refuses to spend the same amount to give its citizens affordable health care?” Because of the massive counter-efforts by lobbyists and the resistance of the right wing, we’re holding our breaths on the answer to that question.

A doctor who’s in the thick of the current health-care debate made a crucial point when he told me that the real issue shouldn’t be limited to medical insurance reform rather an entire medical-care reform. It’s been rightly said that the most expensive technology in American medicine is the doctor’s pen, because with a flourish of the hand he can order an unnecessary test or surgery.  Some kind of insurer must pay for that, so simply providing more coverage will not bring healthcare costs to economically sustainable levels, nor will it ensure better health to society.

We were told from the start that health-care reform would be tough. On one side stands the public, with its tangled needs for medical care. What would be best for them? President Obama’s town meetings have outlined the basics: lower costs, universal coverage, and a public plan to compete with private insurers. Among advanced countries, only the U.S. lacks those things. On the other side stand vest interests — doctors, insurance companies, hospitals, and pharmaceutical giants — who have their own needs. It goes without question that money is the first, overriding almost everything else. Doctors speak out for high quality of care, but what they really mean is maintaining the current backbreaking level of surgeries and new drugs.

A story crossed the Atlantic last week about funeral services for England’s last surviving veteran of World War I. Born in 1898, Harry Patch was 111 when he passed away last month in a nursing home.  The rites for him attracted as much attention for the fact that soldiers from Belgium, France, and Germany attended as for his great age and symbolic status. Mr. Patch was especially eager that former enemies should meet; he had grown vocally anti-war in his last years. The New York Times quoted him as saying “Too many died. War isn’t worth one life.”  World War I was ignited for the slimmest of reasons, like our own Iraq War, but with staggeringly more casualties: 900,000 Britons alone.

Recently I wrote on the perils of being a super-power. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the United States hasn’t fared well as the world’s only super-power, given our enormous fall in global approval and the misadventure in Iraq.  The article was labeled “an anti-American screed” by one right-wing blogger and attacked on Fox News. Which got me thinking about what it means to be pro-American, or for that matter, just American.

What’s Worse, Health Care or Cancer?

Former President Jimmy Carter, writing this month on behalf of a dozen world leaders including Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, condemned “the male interpretations of religious texts” that have “provided a reason or excuse for the deprivation of women’s equal rights . . . This is in clear violation not just of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets, Muhammad, and founders of other great religions.”Carter and his fellow Elders issued this statement: “The justification of discrimination against women and girls on grounds of religion or tradition, as if it were prescribed by a Higher Authority, is unacceptable.”

On his visit to Moscow, President Obama carried more than an olive branch. He urged Russia to join the global community, which may be more important even than healing the mess that George Bush made of Russian-American relations. From the perspective of the former Soviet Union, there have been a lot of betrayed promises in the past ten years, and Obama needed to attend to that. His theme of a fresh start was welcome news.