The efforts at health care reform now working its way through the hallowed halls of our government is something that should deeply anger all Americans, left and right, Democrat or Republican or Independent. Nothing that comes from these current efforts will ever solve the agony and suffering of tens of millions of Americans who are currently caught in the health care dilemma.
The bottom line is that our government - and our representatives in it - is bought and paid for by monied interests, most notably the large insurance companies that siphon off hundreds of billions of dollars each year in profits that should be going, not into their coffers and salaries, but into care for the sick and ill in our society.
No other modern, industrialized country in the world approaches health care in this insane manner. These other societies spend far less than we on health care, and yet the statistics continually show that they beat us all the time in longevity, percentages of children dying in birth, and most importantly the fact that they provide basic coverage for all of their citizens. Meanwhile we have tens of millions without any coverage, and tens of millions more with shoddy policies and undercoverage that leads, for many, to bankruptcy.
Meanwhile, our representatives dawdle.
It is part of the larger picture. The resources and blood and sweat and welfare of the American people, more and more, is taking a back seat to monied interests. We spend hundreds of billions, even trillions, on war and the production of machines and aircraft and ships and guns that stokes the bottom lines of bloated war production companies whose products get ground up in battle or rust away into obsolescence and never produce anything of real value for the lives of Americans; and then we produce another war, or extend the ones we are in, and the old machines are replaced by new ones that feed once again the bottom lines of mega-war companies.
Thirty-five percent of the monies that flow into insurance companies - totaling hundreds of billions of dollars each year - are chewed up in advertising, paperwork, executive salaries, etc. - and this money alone is enough to provide basic coverage for all of the American people. Yet we cannot break this vicious cycle of inept, bought-off, uncaring representation we have in the hallowed halls of Congress.
The big insurance companies are not in the least essential to good health care coverage. They are profit-driven, not people driven. Our whole system is profit-driven, not people driven.
Even tiny Taiwan, when deciding how to revamp their health care, appointed experts who sat down and objectively tried to examine the best points of health care in countries around the world, so that that they could create a health care system that they could afford and one which took the very best care of all of their people. They succeeded. Take a look at the PBS program, “Sick Around the World“, and see what other countries have done.
Here in America, we refuse to believe that any system in the world can teach us anything, that we are the best, and that we have nothing to learn from anyone. As a result, we will get the health care system we deserve. We will stick to our old ways, and the people will lose out.
The current reform efforts will keep the big insurance companies and they will thrive because people will now be mandated to have coverage and the insurance companies will now have tens of millions more customers. And do you really think the insurance companies and the people who run them will be nice guys and not try to make even more money, more profit?
It’s time to wake up.