You probably won’t read this perspective on the Health Care Divide from the sheltered habitats of mainstream Editorial Land. Neither do the working poor tend to offer up an autobiographical accounting of themselves in any form of media.
So, here it is. The working poor are interested in spending their pay on vices, not on health care plans.
SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — Police said they’ve busted two brothels in the Hamptons.
Southampton Police Sgt. James Kiernan said the brothels were run out of homes in Westhampton and Southampton, and catered to dozens of day laborers. One of the prostitutes was from New Jersey.
Three men and two women have pleaded not guilty to charges ranging from prostitution to promoting prostitution, and patronizing a prostitute.
Police believe there are more brothels in the area. The investigation is continuing.
Sure, we can quibble over the amount spent on daily vices like $5 for a pack of cigs, some beer, booze, illicit drugs, or twenty minutes waist deep in raunchy snatch-for-hire versus the monthly cost of a health insurance plan.
But, Who Pays and How Much misses the point.
Whether we are stuck with a public option, a privatized option, or any hybrid combination, who pays the bill is not the right question to ask. The silent debate on national health care was always about preventive medicine for people betterment versus a treatment based model for raking in profit from the lifelong sickly.
Since we’ve elected treatment style health care in America, shuffling around the bill payer from private to public to hybrid isn’t going to save us in the long run.
The irresponsible majority, drawn from a growing population, will continue to flood clinics and emergency rooms in expanding droves, overtaxing these vital services until the breaking point.
Three out of five hospital nurses say they care for too many patients, according to a survey from the American Federation of Teachers and its health care division, AFT Healthcare. “Nurse understaffing may seem to save money in the short term–but it costs lives,” says Candice Owley, chair of the AFT Healthcare division.
The silent debate on all fronts including health care was always a question of our values as a civilization. Do we continue to variously profit from / pay for the mayhem resulting from unrestrained individual liberty or will we seek alternatives?
I went without health care for years because I couldn’t afford it. I lived with the reality that if I got really sick I’d just die — that was my choice to make and my responsibility to take. Now, if there was a feasible way to give everyone free, quality health care it would be great — but there isn’t, at least not now with our national debt and deficit spiraling out of control. The government can’t do that, it won’t, and is making no pretense that it will. The problem I see is the new law FORCES people to BUY insurance at their own expense, whether they want to or not.
Really, the problems with health care are as follows:
(1) Doctors WAY charges too much. They should make good money for their efforts, but the amount most currently make is ridiculous.
(2) Frivalous law suits and excessive settlement push cost up.
(3) Too much is wanted or recommended, with specialist doing everything and general practicioners reduced to a referral service and a desire to test for every little thing just in case.
(4) People have become so isolated from death they treat it as unnatural and go pay through the nose trying to live forever.
*(5)* Society has evolve an insurance based system. Insurance invented to cover the improbable, things like disaster and ships lost at sea, with the insurance company making money statistically. It not intended to take care of daily maintenance (ever hear of car insurance covering oil changes?). But with health cost so high, people depend on health insurance for everything, with insurance companies dictating care while insurance company profits add another layer of cost. Government run medicare benefits have come to largely dictate prices, as private insurance companies base what they will pay on what the government does, and most health care providers simply charge the maximum they can get based on medicare’s guidelines (as would be predicted). The current plan is a band-aid that simple adds another kind of insurance while depriving individuals of there right to opt-in or -out at there own discretion.
Unfortunately, any non-free universal insurance system, that can never deny anyone, HAS TO make insurance mandatory or people WILL abuse the system by paying nothing in and then signing up the moment they become seriously ill.
Instead, people should be allowed to choose the risks they want to take, and whether to live or die if it comes to it.
A fair compromise would take the form of an opt out clause. Why involuntarily grow and put on long term life support on your dime a population that’s slowly getting dumber, weaker, uglier, more immoral and less honest?
It’s more corporate welfare that looks like an aspect of national socialism on the surface. But, instead of a distinct volk that we’re encouraging to get better, we get the expansion of generic bipeds in our midst with money to spend to assorted taxable, ever more frequently disposable trinkets.
They’re sickly and broken, but breathing and shopping for all sorts of diversion to get their minds off an aimless and miserly existence brimming with overcrowding and pollution.