Here And Now On Health Care

I think we'll eventually get single payer, but not right away. The sports analogy I like to use is that you can't hit a three-run homer without putting people on base first, but let me instead make a historical comparison:

When the UK and Canada passed their national health care systems, there wasn't already a pre-existing system in place. They built it, pretty much, from scratch. Not so here, where profitized, private health care has been the norm. And yes, people don't like change. It's scary, as you can see from some of the comments on my own posts here. We can't just dismantle the system we currently have, we have to have a sort of hybrid system where the old insurance is gradually phased out to be replaced by a national health care plan. And even that isn't going to happen without a fight.

So I think what's important here and now is momentum. Americans really do want national health care, and in greater numbers than ever before, but the profiteers still have the advantage in access to power. If we can get things done that paves the way for more changes in the future, it will show the politicians that a national health care system can be a winner politically. Because every time they've tried this before and failed, no one wants to touch it, and we'll have to wait another generation or so to try again. And I don't know if we can afford to wait that long.

I know how hard it is to be patient. This is a battle we've been fighting for over sixty years, and the forces opposed to it are very powerful and are not about to get off the gravy train just yet. We have to continually put pressure on our elected officials and make it clear that regardless of how much money they're getting from lobbyists, their phoney-baloney jobs are on the line here.

And finally, sitting there and yelling that "Obama is the worst ever" is not constructive. There's no liberal politician out there that could conceivably do any better than what we have right now, and wishing for the perfect politician to come by only helps the opposition. President Obama is who we elected and it's up to us to give him the political cover to do the things that need to be done. If we make this an all-or-nothing fight we'll get nothing.

The Bottom Line

If Congressmen and Senators had to go through all the bullshit the rest of us have to in dealing with the profitized health care industry instead of having the socialized health care they all enjoy, we'd have had a national health care system decades ago.

All this talk about how, under a national health plan, some guvmint byeurrr-oh-crat will tell you which doctor you have to have or any of the other horror stories they tell you is just bullshit. My wife was on Medicare and the only problem she had finding doctors was when they tried to find ways not to treat her because she was on Medicare and treating her was bad for the bottom line. I challenge anyone who reads this who is on or who knows someone who is on Medicare or Medicaid to show me any instance where a federal agent came to their house and told them which doctor they had to have. It's the same lie they've been peddling for seventy five years, it wasn't true then and it's not true now.

And speaking of the bottom line, let's make something clear: from a purely economic point of view, the bottom line is that most of us are pretty worthless: expendable cogs in an economic machine, easily replaced. If the day ever comes when we decide that the value of a human life is something that can't be measured on a balance ledger, maybe that will begin to change.

Update: Thanks to TiredDem in the comments, here's a horrific story about how Wal-Mart, arguably among the most evil corporate entities on Earth, takes out life insurance policies on its own employees. Over 350,000 to be exact. Which gives them great incentive to work their employees to death.

Bottom line is that guy was worth more dead than alive to his employer. And I bet the person that takes his place will be pressured to work just as hard.

Crime, as I continue to point out, pays.

Happy New Year

As many of you are probably well aware, today is the fortieth anniversary of man's landing on the Moon. I still feel that this is the single greatest achievement in human history, not just for the technological achievement of landing people on the Moon and returning them safely home, but as an example of accomplishing something that was deemed impossible.

It's easy for us to be cynical in this day and age because we've been let down by so many things we were taught to trust, and as you all know I'm as big a cynic as they come, but the historical fact is that we proved that we can do wondrous things when we put our minds to it.

I also want to point out that the entire enterprise was run by the government: no private organization could have acomplished this, not because they are incompetent (and they're no more or less competent than any government agency) but because there's simply no profit in it, and business, after all, exists for the sole purpose of making money. And too many of us can't seem to understand that grabbing money and power aren't the reasons for everything.

I've heard that some people use this date as the beginning of the New Year and established 1969 as Year One of a new calendar (much like Western civilization used the birth of Jesus as a beginning point), so Happy Year 40 everyone! To celebrate, here's my favorite space-and-politics related YouTube clip.

Amazing

You would think that when it becomes clear that the jig is up, the crooks would either just bow to the inevitable and give themselves up, or turn their weapons on themselves, or whatever.

But not the health care profiteers. Everyone who isn't an elected government official or otherwise covered by some sort of non-profitized health care system knows that what we have now is clearly a scam. After the defeat of the Clinton health care plan nearly twenty years ago, the insurance companies had the opportunity to show how superior the free market health care system could be. And I think it's safe to say that if they had honestly taken a look at it they may have figured out a way to make it work. Maybe.

But of course that's not what they did. They went out and did everything they could to squeeze money out of people and then reneged on paying claims as much as they possibly could, and more so. In other words, they went out and proved what some of us knew all along: some things should not be for profit. They're not interested in health care, they're interested in making money. As I said, everybody knows this now.

But they're not giving up. I have no idea why they think the "socialized medicine" scare tactics will work when profitized health care has proved to be such a disaster, or why they seem to think that by delaying or watering down health care reform they'll do anybody, even themselves, any good. But they wouldn't be fighting so hard to maintain a system that really is killing people if they didn't think they had an ace in the hole somewhere. The fact that they have this kind of chutzpah shows once more how crime pays in this day and age in the US of A, and once again I'm at a loss to know what to do about it.

Crime Pays

I think if you could sum up the last thirty years in general and the last ten or so specifically in one, simple phrase, that would be it.

Welcome to the sucker class, suckers.

Well

That's about as long a time as I can recall not posting. Two reasons for this: personal issues and the fact that I'm writing more non-political stuff over on Facebook (and you can find me there under the name Joe Vecchio if you're on that as well).

I saw an article in the NY Times that said that 6% of Americans think the Moon landing was a fake. That may not seem like a lot, but consider that 6% of 300 million is 18 million, which is roughly the population of the state of Florida, or the combined population of the fifteen least populated states in the country.

39%, apparently, don't "believe" in evolution and while I'm on the subject, I hate using that term: evolution is no more a matter of belief, than "believing" in gravity or Newtonian physics. At any rate, it's just more proof, to me, that the country is getting dumber and meaner.

On other notes, my work has gotten me to tread some new waters: I downloaded the evaluation version of Windows 7 and installed it on one of the machines at work, I also downloaded Ubuntu (A Linux-based open source operating system) and installed it on my home computer. So far, I am impressed with both, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to learn about them.