Health Care Debate
This was a letter to the editor of The Buffalo River Review…
The debate on health care is being put aside as the Senate takes the month off. Clearly it is an issue they would rather avoid altogether, after all they are covered very well themselves and the industry in control of our health care is so profitable that it is well positioned to defend itself from any reform. This is because, as we all know, the Senator’s depend on industry contributions to their all important campaigns. The stories about how terrible socialized systems of insurance or medicine are again being passed around reflecting the views of those who are insured and able to pay, never mind the growing number of people who are not. The selfish gene, no doubt spawned by fear and ideology, is well established. Some of us are repelled by that notion and think that we all should be taking care of one another individually and through our organizations and our government. Is health care really something we want only a few people to profit from? I’m not talking about people’s jobs, I’m talking about profits taken out of the industry that show up on Wall Street. This leeching of our health care dollars seems to me to be as barbaric as using leeches to treat disease. There is also a lot of wasteful redundancy in the administration of health care and insurance as doctors and hospitals have whole departments just to deal with insurance companies. A single-payer system would nearly eliminate all that and take this cost down from as much as 50% to 3%, the current cost of administering Medicare. We need more care-givers and fewer care-deniers. It is not necessary to have a huge bureaucracy to decide who gets care and who doesn’t when everyone is covered.
However, I think the economy is going to trump any system we currently have or imagine we will get from our centralized government. I expect government will use the crisis to increase its power over us, as usual. State socialism and capitalism are both collapsing because they are both based on resource extraction without any balance with nature’s economy. Both ideologies being fueled by fossil fuels could only sustain growth as long as those resources were prevalent. Oil production has now peaked and will begin to taper off and we are now blowing off whole mountaintops to get at the coal that is left to sate our enormous appetites. Those of us who imagine an economic recovery of this system are simply ignoring that reality.
The truth is there is no economy to recover. The manufacturing base was shipped out years ago replaced by an imaginary economy, what some call the “service economy,” all buoyed on the real estate bubble. Many of those assets have now become liabilities since the bubble’s burst. As unemployment is only going to increase, at least within this system, we will have a hard time paying for anything much less healthcare for everyone. The US government went bankrupt in 1933 and ever since we have been borrowing from, and going deeper in debt to the central bank, private bankers represented by the FED. Its no wonder they called in their notes and got their trillions first as the economy began to sputter and stop. And its no wonder many Americans are irked by the huge pay bonuses being given their executives.
So what can we do? All the great religious teachers have told us to “look within.” Perhaps we should and reconsider who it is that knows what is good for us. I think we have to relearn what should be self-evident truths, that each and everyone of us is endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, among them being life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And there are many more rights not enumerated in the constitution, for instance, who can be happy without their health issues being cared for etc.? We fought the revolution because we recognized the usurpation of our inalienable rights, primary among which at that moment in history, was to control the issue of our own money instead of being forced to use the crown’s money. We wanted to control our own money so we could control our own leech-free economy, you see.
Mind you, I’m not calling anyone a leech, we are all human’s caught up in a system that knows nothing but how to extract and control populations so it can continue to extract. This system has created a monoculture of humankind that has spread all around the planet, which you can recognize it by the style of clothing, architecture, tools and their corporate labels. We simply have to begin to subscribe to a new more balanced system, one to our liking, one that affirms our best values as humans, as the stewards and gardeners of this beautiful living earth. Many of us know that preventive health should be getting more attention and we need to provide that attention ourselves, individually and collectively as a community. Healthy food and clean water are our first priority and we should work together to assure we will have enough for ourselves and for future generations. We should also use our collective intelligence to create a local economy through production and barter, even issuing and controlling our own money if needed. this needs to happen in every community and in some it already is. Some of you might wonder how we can do this or if anyone cares. I would say that it all has to begin with a conversation, one that builds from person to person into small group meetings until we can have a community meeting to air everyone’s ideas of how we can build a local economy without being dependent on a failing system. We have a beginning, let’s keep talking.
