Tuesday, May 12, 2009

HealthCare, Who Cares?

I’m on day six of a bad case of flu. Saturday was the worst. Sunday I went into urgent care and then I finally got some high dosage medicine and I’m slowly coming out of it. In my semi-sleep-awake last few days a lot of things were tossed around inside my aching head.
1. The Pain. This flu gave me the worst headache I have ever had. Rolling my eyes was excruciating. I couldn’t imagine pain any worse. Then I would think about our former President more openly allowing torture on US capitalism’s individual enemies, innocent or guilty, and how physical torture was long ago replaced by psychological torture. Of course, this didn’t make me feel any better.
2. American Healthcare. The last thing I wanted to do was go down to the ER and wait and wait. I think of people who take their terribly sick kids down there in the middle of the night. Some years ago I got extremely sick in the middle of the night in a bed and breakfast in France while visiting family. I was pretty delirious, but at some point a doctor knocked on my door and assessed me. He gave me an injection, some prescription drugs and didn’t care that I was uninsured.
3. My Health Plan. Since being laid off in February my family’s health benefits run out in about 8 weeks. All of Obama’s generalizations about Solving The Healthcare Crisis, are just that bland generalizations. If I get accepted onto a Cobra Plan, we will get 9 more months of reduced cost healthcare, then its CASH only.
4. Healthcare Solution. For a quarter of what they’re throwing at the bank we could have a nationalized healthcare system, cut out the parasitic middle men, provide care for all, initiate genuine preventative care and cut out one of the major stresses of jobless. But a capitalist government is a capitalist government. The Mantra of get the banks lending is the Word. Get half of us who have some spare cash to buy bigger and bigger flat screens, and screw the 25 million of us who are unemployed, underemployed or given up on looking. Healthcare is only valuable in this world if you can make big Profits out of it.
Well the vicodin is kicking in, so I’m off.

1 comment:

Richard Mellor said...

I've had a flu like that, let's not forget that flu killed millions in the past. Hope you get well soon--all of you.

Obama, covering for the health industry moguls referred to their "voluntary" decision to reduce health care costs $2 trillion over the next ten years as a "Watershed Event."

These are the guys whose policies allow for people to be dumped in the streets when they can't pay for hospital care.

The US spends about 16% of its GDP on health care, some $2.2 trillion annually, more than any other industrialized country. We get the worst return for this, some 46 million have no insurance at all.

Why should you have to buy insurance, pay a middleman for treatment when you're sick, one might ask.

Well, you are looking at it the wrong way, health care is not about health care for those that own all the resources that make up health care; it is a business. And in a business, it is legitimate to make profit, in fact, profit is the sole reason for a business to exist----middlemen are a natural part of the business world.

The health care industry wants "any government insurance to be limited in scope so it does not draw middle class families away from the private system" says today's Financial Times. Obama will comply.

The government will have no power to enforce these so-called savings targets but one administration official echoed Obama's gleeful response saying that it shows the industry execs willingness to "cooperate with reforms"

These thugs, like the auto execs and the rest of the capitalist class are not out of the woods yet; they are deathly concerned that the anger and hatred of the bankers and billionaire CEO's will not be restrained or limited to self harm or passive resistance---they are united with the government that represents their interests in an effort to convince workers that they plan a better future.

This won't work forever.