Farewell to Welfare? Europe Offers U.S. a Lesson on Caring

“Americans would see [ours] as the worst system in the world,” a French publisher told me recently when referring to France’s “womb to tomb” welfare state. “The French do not think society will be cared for without intervention of the state.”

The publisher, Jean-Pierre Sakoun, heads the Paris office of an international firm producing electronically accessed bibliographies for libraries. He spent two weeks last summer living with his family in our Laguna Beach home while our family lived in the Sakouns’ Paris apartment. By European standards, he thought Orange County and America’s anti-welfare mentality was heartless and uncaring.

Is he right?

To assess the functioning of welfare systems on the other side of the Atlantic in order to enrich the modern history courses I teach at Rancho Santiago College, I spent a month in France and Italy this past summer interviewing two dozen government officials, business executives, academicians, journalists and physicians.

In a nutshell, the heavily taxed French--and to a lesser extent, the Italians--can count on affordable national health care, generous unemployment benefits, retirement pensions and free public education through the university level. Though admitting the need for some reductions, all 24 said the idea of deep cuts in welfare spending was unacceptable.

While struggling to maintain their welfare systems, Europeans had definite opinions about America’s programs. Only two of the 24 thought the U.S. had an adequate welfare policy. The remaining 22, who spoke warmly of Americans, rated our welfare system “inadequate” compared to those of Europe.

“Europeans will not follow America into abandonment of the needy,” journalist Barry James of the Paris-based International Herald Tribune assured me.

Regarding health care, a Paris physician-hospital administrator, David Elkharrat, told me: “The American system of health care is very unfair. If a person in your country is seriously ill, they cannot get health insurance. In France, the more serious your sickness, the more health insurance coverage you get.”

Said psychiatrist Paolo Bonaiuto, an internationally renowned professor at the University of Rome, “I go to the U.S. every year and am concerned that if something happens to me [medically], I’ll not be able to pay.”

Though Europeans may not know that 39 million Americans have no health care coverage, including 10 million children, they rightly perceive an erosion of caring in our social systems.

This erosion of caring is particularly evident after the passage of the 1996 welfare reform law, which dismantles the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program and severely reduces aid to legal immigrants. Some legal immigrants in Orange County fear they will be left without food or any assistance since notices were sent out Nov. 1 to relief applicants.

The rolling back of America’s welfare state via the recent reform law is due largely to our culture of rugged individualism that emphasizes near total personal responsibility for our own fate. This is strange to Europeans, who, like business executive Sakoun, attribute poverty “largely to business cycle and social injustices.”

Oblivious to such notions, Orange County’s congressional delegation decries America’s welfare system as the cause of poverty and other social pathologies. As a result, one can understand the fears of 114,000 people in our county who receive government cash and the 142,000 who receive food stamps. Add to these numbers the poor who cannot afford health or dental insurance in the county--including most of the students in my classes--and one sees that public caring hangs by a thread in one of the most affluent counties in the world’s richest industrial nation.

Not nearly as wealthy as the U.S. and stretched economically to the limits, the nations of Europe seem determined to keep their social safety nets intact as much as possible. Can America afford to be so uncaring as to ignore their example?

Professor Thomas J. Osborne teaches in the History Department of Rancho Santiago College, where he also coordinates the Honors Program.