He said, voice dripping with contemptuous sarcasm.
And hey look, a part two!
The links harbor pithy graphics explaining some things about our profit-driven system.
You can distill it down even further just by pointing out that unfettered capitalism guarantees crap health care. No sane business is going to throw money at people who get expensively sick, not when they can kick them out onto the street through a loophole. Until profit is stuffed into the back seat behind the needs of patients our system will continue to be a ridiculously expensive failure.
2 comments:
The evils of the current health care system aren't because of a terrible clique of capitalists holding the government at bay while they plot their wicked work. It's because of a terrible clique of capitalists empowered by and in league with the government plotting their wicked work together.
It takes a faith I don't have and that seems to me to fly in the face of history and experience and common sense to think that empowering the U.S. government to exercise more control over the health industry than it already abuses will make things better.
For instance, medicine isn't expensive in the U.S. because "the US government is less involved in price regulation" but because the U.S. government is intimately involved in creating and enforcing monopolies in the pharmaceutical industry. If it allowed competition, prices would drop, because the greedy capitalists in the insurance industry would hunt out the cheapest provider.
The astounding administrative overhead slide is also revealing. We're supposed to believe that giving the government more control over the health industry will result in less paperwork and less bureaucracy? Pick any of the large federal interventions in the health care industry that have happened in the past and look to see whether such a miracle happened! Why do we expect any different this time around?
This is my essential complaint with 'Obamacare'- it does nothing to fix any of the systemic problems we suffer from, rather empowering both big Pharma and health insurers by forcing people to buy shit insurance that will get jerked away in a hot minute should anyone need *real* care. It does a few good things around the edges, but you can't build anything meaningful on a foundation of shit.
Happily, Bernie Sanders is leading the charge for single payer in Vermont and with Arnie out of the statehouse we might luck into it here in Cali too.
What bemuses me about the whole "debate" is pretty much everyone ignores the reality of other industrialized nations having systems that work. The Wife had an asthma attack and ended up in the hospital in England for nearly a week. Cost to her- nothing. A similar experience here in the USA created a burden of debt that pursued her for a decade.
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