The Joke's on Us...

O.K., O.K., O.K……  I can’t hold out any longer.  I did BLOG posts for a couple of days that weren’t even close to RANT, and I’ll confess it felt pretty good… BUT I’ve had it up to ...here...with the jokes about failed sign-up systems and continual dumping on the President for his efforts to create, with Congress, a program that at least begins to try to meet the health needs of All 317.13 million of us.  My discouragement has turned into full-on disgust with anybody who doesn’t want all people who need medical care and better health to have it… And I don’t want to hear all that “stuff” (I’m holding back here…) from the people who like to trot out “examples” of why the poor are to blame for their own poverty. I’m tired of excuses and “but if…”

The way I see it, in the first place “Obamacare” shouldn’t have been a necessary strategy to get health care for everybody in a nation like ours, a society which is often described as “affluent” by those willing to forget about the bottom forty percent of our citizen.  Other less wealthy nations have managed to make appropriate health care available for all their citizens.  We could do it. Sí, podemos. Es posible. I stand with Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont) and most Democrats who have long advocated for a single-payer health plan for America.  A single-player plan scares the shit out of some investors, many health practitioners, self-serving politicians, and CEO’s of insurance companies whose primary goal for their companies is to earn more and more profit from every policy sold.  Because a single-payer plan includes scrapping private health insurance and getting EVERYBODY into a program very much like Medicare (acknowledged dirty word for most Republicans… oddly unacceptable even to many of those Republicans of my generation who benefit greatly from Medicare and would be in deep “stuff” without it.) with a comprehensive set of benefits financed through (here comes another of those unacceptable words/ideas) taxation (just the way you pay for the road you take to the grocery store or to church)… a plan whose primary reason for being is providing medical care, not earning profits, the majority of Republicans in public office are unwilling even to talk about it. I know a whole bunch of people in medical professions whose primary motivation isn’t profit… my primary care doctor is one of them… and so are the people who work with him. They are part of the Sharp Health Care Care system in my area, a very good not-for-profit system where the people who work in the system are making reasonable wages with reasonable benefits (but are certainly not getting rich).  BUT the only way the poorest people, including many, many, many children… people typically without health insurance, can get treatment in any health system in San Diego and in most of America is to go to an emergency room. 

The President and the people in Congress whose commitment is to ALL citizens have had to settle for the Affordable Care Act.  Senator Sanders has said we are having to settle for “a system which is so complex, its main function is to enable insurance companies, drug companies, medical equipment suppliers to be making huge amounts of money off of the system.”   Republicans in the House of Representatives and in the Senate haven’t been willing even to let a plan get to committee for discussion, much less get to the floor of the House or the Senate for a vote. The serious flaw in the Affordable Health Care program is not the Internet structure on which it depends to work efficiently, BUT on the same insurance companies that got us the flawed, outrageously expensive medical care system that doesn’t meet the needs of ALL people, an insurance industry that has been able to refuse to offer insurance to people who are already sick, to exclude classes of people because they are more likely to need medical care at some future time. The Affordable Care Act is requiring younger, obviously healthier people to enroll in order for the insurance companies to continue to make huge profits because the program no longer allows them to exclude sick or older people. 

One good way to evaluate a single-payer plan is to look at the health care program provided to each and every legislator in the House and Senate. Those citizens, our elected legislators, are very happy with their health plan. What they enjoy, paid for by taxation, is what virtually all Democrats want for all citizens.  I’d like very much for all of those in Congress who are against a single-payer health plan but who enjoy health care benefits,  paid for by citizens, to look the nation squarely in the eyes and say out loud, “We can’t afford to provide for you what you are giving to us. You don’t deserve what you are paying for us to have.”