Yeah, Ron? And when the hell is America going to wise up to the fact that socialized medicine in one form or another is the only practical and civilized solution, unless a nation is so extreme and alarming in its moral bankruptcy that it is quite prepared to allow its poor to suffer and die (yes, die) while supporting the obscene profits of insurance companies, HMOs, the medical profession and pharmaceutical industry? Hey Ron, your family wasn’t financially devastated by your Alzheimer’s, but hundreds have been. To demonize functional, organized, single-payer healthcare as “socialist” is as fundamentally absurd as talking about a “socialized” army or “socialized” sanitation and highways. (Although Bush seems to be busy privatizing the bloody military.) Healthcare is simply another facet of national defense, or, if you like, the national infrastructure. If the idea of altruism bothers anyone, look at it as self-interest. Is capitalism simply too obtuse to realize that, if the poor have no health care, they represent, in the event of an epidemic (or pandemic) an untreated vulnerability vector that points the virus straight at the rich? I would go on at length except everyone seems to glaze over at this point in the rant, refusing to accept that, in the matter of healthcare, the USA willfully chooses to be a third-world hellhole for about 40 million of its citizens. (Pic from Tom Sutpen)
The secret word is Sick
And all this talk of health care provides, I guess, the thinnest pretext for running Elvis Costello and Steve Naïve playing “Pills & Soap”
Luciano Pavarotti – RIP
The secret word is Sick
And all this talk of health care provides, I guess, the thinnest pretext for running Elvis Costello and Steve Naïve playing “Pills & Soap”
Luciano Pavarotti – RIP
uhm, "everyone"? i for one want to hear more. tell it, mick.
ReplyDeleteif you detect any glazing over, however, it might be b/c many of us americans are not indifferent at all but simply already totally accept that the USA's PTB have screwed the citizenry in this regard. and we are fully aware of the extent as well. (i spend way too much to keep myself minimally insured, and as i get older the cost goes up, even though i am not in ill health. and my main man probably could not even GET coverage, even if he could afford the astronomical cost. and that's just two of us.)
just b/c the MSM seems to have suddenly found out that a huge number of americans are uninsured doesn't mean the rest of us haven't been paying attention.
Maybe "everyone" is a hyperbole but I find the most unexpected and even radical individuals seem to have been totally sold the "evils" of socialism, and the fiction that the systems in (say) France and Canada are dysfunctionally chaotic and unworkable when quite the reverse is true.
ReplyDeleteIts not all hunky dory here in the uk either Mick, my wife is in hospital and while she,s there the care is impeccable but once out the support vanishes. And we have a Labour (?)gov.
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