The access of regular people to presidential campaigners--as in the case of Joe the Plumber and President Barack Obama in 2008, and as in Iowa in recent days--can produce moments that are poignant, profound, revealing and defining.
It happened Saturday in Iowa.
A Hillary Clinton supporter rose at a Ted Cruz rally to ask Cruz what he would put in place of Obamacare, "every word" of which Cruz routinely vows in his campaign stump speech to repeal.
In other words: What are you going to do absent the Affordable Care Act for the really sick people of limited resources after you have milked your easy anti-Obama rhetoric for its last rousing cheer from a partisan audience?
The Hillary Clinton supporter told Cruz that his late brother-in-law, a self-employed barber, couldn't afford health insurance until the enactment of Obamacare. Then, the man said, his brother-in-law saw a doctor for the first time in a decade only to be told that he suffered from multiple and inoperable cancerous tumors, from which he died.
Cruz had no good answer. After all, he is trying to get the Republican presidential nomination, not solve problems.
He invoked two boilerplate and clichéd conservative notions--interstate portability of health-insurance policies and personal health savings accounts (HSA).
The first wouldn't have helped the late barber, who couldn't afford health insurance, period, regardless of where he might have taken it.
The second seems an unlikely solution. After all, the very point of the man's tragic anecdote is that the late barber hadn't enjoyed the availability of any spare cash for health insurance. If he had no money for a health-insurance premium, then presumably he had no spare cash for deposit into a personal health savings account.
Anyway, the annual tax-deferral limits for personal HSA deposits aren't high enough to begin to pay for something as oppressively costly as cancer treatment.
You could max out on your annual HSA tax-deferred contributions for a decade and still not be able to afford a single instance of some of these cancer treatments.
The average American can't fight cancer alone. That's why we need big insurance pools for such things.
A personal HSA is, at best, a supplement to a health-insurance policy. It is not a new panacea, but an old and mere element.
Maybe it can provide an income-tax break and cover a high deductible. But to invoke it as a solution to a catastrophic health occurrence is to let the well-off get care and the rest eat cake.
Then Cruz said the reason the barber couldn't get health insurance was the high cost and that the solution to that was government deregulation of the health-insurance industry.
Just let Blue Cross handle it, in other words. Let the middle man write the fine print. Let him interpret and apply that fine print. Let the middle man decide who can get coverage and at what price. Let the market decide how much the middle man can get away with charging.
After all, deregulation worked well in the housing and financial markets leading to 2008.
Obamacare is an actual solution, albeit messy and imperfect. But it appears to be on its way to grudging acceptance and ongoing function, if by inertia.
It assures the availability of health insurance to all, even those with pre-existing conditions, at premiums held down for all--not yet far enough--by the greater number of customers in the pool. It prescribes minimum coverage that a policy must provide. Then it provides a staggered set of subsidies for persons below a low-middle-class income.
It would get a brother-in-law to the doctor sooner.
Cruz tried to rescue himself by reaching for this handy rhetoric: Obama once promised that the Affordable Care Act would reduce a family's health-insurance premiums by $2,500 a year.
It hasn't done nearly that, of course--which is an indictment of Obama's own too-easy rhetoric, not of his policy and program, which, in time, could stabilize the health-care market.
Cruz said he would gladly make this deal: Democrats could have the votes of all Americans whose health-care costs had declined by $2,500 under Obamacare, and he would settle for the rest.
The audience laughed.
I've always thought I had a good sense of humor. But maybe I don't.
I can't quite grasp the comedy of multiple cancerous tumors, nor of a grieving brother-in-law's failed attempt at a public forum to get a relevant answer to a simple question from a man who presumes to run for president.
Saying a cancer victim should have saved money he didn't have, and that he should have been allowed to carry across a state line the health-insurance policy he couldn't afford--that's not cracking me up.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 02/02/2016