I was sent an email from a family member copying and pasting from a recent post by Gary DeMar on Godfather Politics. I just spent about 20 minutes rewriting it. Too bad their comment section is limited to 5,000 characters, but maybe this will get back to them somehow. I’m not sure if I should link to that blog here or not. Let me know. And here we go...
Think about this for a moment. We are debating how the health care insurance companies should control our healthcare choices by taking away our choices and our money. In essence, we are debating how these private corporations should control our lives. It’s maddening that we are sitting back and letting it happen.
We are an economic version of zombies.
I realize that we didn't have any vote for the people who finance the campaigns of the candidates who said they would repeal Obamacare, but then these elected officials are unwilling to do it anyway because so many lives depend on the current insurance system. Five Supreme Court Justices, appointed by both Republicans and Democrats, ruled in a 5-4 decision that healthcare is the province of the State. It’s amazing. ”O well, I guess we’re going to have to figure out how to do this.” This is a republican democracy of the first order. Is it creeping fascism, creeping socialism, or something else? The debate rages forever.
Who believes that the multi-millionaire business executives are competent to tell the entire health care market how healthcare should be run and financed? What about the doctors that provide the care, the nurses that take care of us in hospitals or the pharmacists that provide our medicines? Shouldn't they have a voice in these decisions? These are literally the same multi-millionaire corporate board members whose banking companies finance our wars, heavy industry manufacturing builds the weapons and extra-governmental economic agents stir the pots in foreign countries directly or even through the CIA that get us into wars that we can’t win and spend money we can't get through taxes so we have to go further and further in debt for.
We’ve already let it happen with education. The education industrial complex is encouraging the privatization of the schools that teach our children and turning them into corporate slaves intellectually and economically, and yet there are the same people — conservatives included– who continue to support teachers unions and public schools financed by our property taxes. If it’s OK to turn our children over to private corporations to be educated, then why not our whole lives?
We need a massive nation-wide uprising. I’m not advocating violence but a loud voice and movement that says, “Stop controlling our lives and controlling our money!”
Let us make our own healthcare choices, without having the cost of those choices drive us into the poorhouse. Once this is done, we won't have to go back and say, “I can’t afford it. Please, save me.” There are fair-market ways to take care of everyone. Other countries already do it, and there are many different models that we can learn from and adapt to our circumstances. All we have to do is look. It might mean extra medical savings accounts to prepare for a medical emergency but many fully developed national health care systems don't require it. And of course we should be driving our cars a year or two longer or backing off on extravagant vacations or not eating out as much. Reducing our footprint on this green Earth is something we all need to take responsibility for.
We really do need to take better physical care of ourselves. Even with all the information we have on smoking and the higher taxes, people still smoke. I watch unhealthy-looking people stand in line and pay $45 or more for a carton of cigarettes. I see fat people waddle around who can barely step up on a curb. These people need motivation to change their habits, and they need the support of a strong community safety net to make sure that they don't fall through the cracks. Nobody is alone in this, if we pull together.
We did need the government when it came to automobile insurance, life insurance, or homeowner’s insurance. All of those insurance systems are heavily regulated on the back end where we can't see them. I can go online and shop for a policy and price for all three of them from a multitude of companies because of those regulations.
Why not do the same for health care? We've tried letting the market take on the job. The problem is that health care is so lightly regulated that any company in the world can claim to be a health insurance company for their own employees or anyone else. Amazon is probably already getting into the insurance business. Same with Wal-Mart? Heck, there are probably some churches that want to create their own insurance pool with their own rules, co-pays, deductibles and decision making panels. With this many actors in the insurance market, doctors and medical providers have to spend Billions of dollars paying people to make sense of it all. Why increase government regulation in the health insurance industry? Because it would save us those Billions of dollars every year!
Market mandated healthcare insurance has driven up costs tremendously, well over and above the natural increase in prices that we have seen over the last hundred years or so. Our grandparents had large families. They did not have to have health insurance, and yet they were able to pay the doctor. Or in my GGrandpa James Putnam's case he could BE the community doctor and a very respected member of his community. How did they do this? Health insurance is the product of government mandates in the economy during World War II. It was a way to get around the wage and price controls after World War II because Congress was too slow to release those controls and it was also a way to start reducing what companies had to pay their employees. The marketplace did a workaround to beat a government edict, and it resulted in an insurance nightmare that we are now living in.
At the present time, the claim is that “healthcare is plagued by barriers to entry for potential new suppliers of services”, which is false, and “patients do not see bills until after services have been offered,” which is true. No other industry does this, because no other industry has been allowed to get away with it. How many people sign a contract to buy a car before they know the price? Big healthcare companies often won’t allow their own medical facilities to build in certain areas because they have decided that there is no “need” because there is not enough profit in that area for them to make. Governments would love to have new hospitals, doctors offices and other types of medical offices, but if insurance companies decide that they can't make sufficient profit by offering insurance products to the people in a county, then the citizens of that county are left to rot by those insurance companies. There is nothing the government can do in those cases. Competition is supposed to be a good thing in a market, but profit taking is all that the current medical industry leaders seem to care about.
There are dozens of competitive pizza businesses near where we live. That's because competition works when there are enough small players in the game to be able to provide for the market need for that product or service. When big players get into an area, it stifles or destroys all of the other players, and government is helpless to restore those jobs because the tax dollars coming from the big players become necessary for the survival of the municipality. That's when you know that the corporations have really taken over, and it's happening all over the country.
“Evidence from other countries illustrates why lowering these barriers to entry is important. In India, Devi Shetty, a surgeon, has taken advantage of economies of scale to develop large, 1,000-bed hospitals that make health care more affordable. Dr. Shetty’s heart treatment hospital charges $2,000 for open-heart surgery—American hospitals average slightly more than 150 beds and charge between $20,000 and $100,000 —while providing high-quality care. Dr. Shetty is currently setting up a chain of similar hospitals in the Cayman Islands to make his services more accessible to patients from the United States as well as the rest of the world.”
“The U.S. health care system is generally not a competitive marketplace. In particular, current law largely restricts consumers to purchasing insurance within their own states. Additionally, current tax policy offers a tax advantage to employer-based health insurance but not individually purchased insurance, causing most Americans to gravitate toward job-based coverage instead of buying insurance on their own. These distortions, generated by government policy, have largely insulated consumers from their health care choices. (Heritage)
These paragraphs are accurate enough, but the fault doesn't lie in the government policy because that could be changed if representatives would just change them. They are prevented from changing them because of the influence of the big players in the market who don't care about anything other than maintaining their own monopoly control.
We’ve seen what the market can do with the airlines after deregulation. More options. But also decreased quality of service, because shaving the food available down to Planters Peanuts and Coke products has saved a lot of money. And the objective of airline design is now to smash as many seats as possible into as small a space as possible. The giant media corporations took control of the broadcast television through well placed government operatives, so the market found a way around it and we got the cable and satellite industry. When consumers grew dissatisfied with fewer options and higher prices, the market stepped in. Now we have Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and a slew of other competing options, and that's great. But now the Cable companies are trying to take control by offering a version of ala carte services and driving all of the smaller players out of the market. Here's hoping that our anti-trust laws will be used to break these monopolies up like they did Standard Oil and AT&T, which by the way are both back bigger and stronger than ever. The government had a monopoly on mail, so UPS, FedEx, and others got in the package delivery service and the world is better for it. But these corporations are also heavily regulated and many of them use the Postal Service in their own routing of packages because it's cheaper than doing everything themselves.
Email has had a devastating effect on the Post Office, but so has the crazy scheme cooked up by Republicans in Congress that required them to fund their retirement system 75 years into the future in an attempt to destroy it entirely so that the big corporations like UPS, FedEx and others that finance their campaign can earn all of the profits instead of letting the Post Office fulfill it's Constitutionally mandated duty.
Our tax system is certainly a nightmare, and if healthcare insurance is so important to our elected officials, why not make out-of-pocket payments deductible? Because it would mean fewer people paying taxes and they're complaining about that enough already. Why not take the healthcare finance money directly from everyone and then pay the expenses through an efficient government-run program like Medicare or Medicaid which already do that? Of course, we know why — power and control. The insurance companies want the power and control over our healthcare decisions to rest in their hands, not ours. Because don't forget, we are by definition our own government, per our founding documents and based on everything we hold sacred in our country.
If we can fix this mess, there will have to be a transition period to a fair system. But the way we are going, we’re going to get the giant fast food version of healthcare. Would you like fries with that?
