I've heard 2 different stories in the last week, about people I know personally, who are avoiding health-care they likely need due to monetary reasons. Both people are not the momentarily-demonized people-of-the-moment who may still be on unemployment because poverty wages aren't tempting enough to return to the workforce.
No, both of them are gainfully employed and make well above minimum wage -- yet our culture and society still creates a situation where we incentivize a pound of cure where an ounce of prevention would have worked. Not to mention the mental stress of delaying needed surgeries or checkups. Progressive agenda items are intriguing to talk about and all -- minimum wage hikes -- UBI -- but none of them will ever feel as necessary, universally healthy for our society at large, or have less accidental disincentives as much as some form of Single-Payer Health Care. We need to stop playing the lottery with everyone's lives and final moments and anguish. It's a broken record thing to say, but we say it over and over again because it's true and there's no excuse for it: FOR BEING THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD, THERE IS NO EXCUSE TO BE THE ONLY FIRST WORLD COUNTRY WHERE PEOPLE GO BANKRUPT OR BANKRUPT THEIR FAMILIES FROM BEING SICK AND DYING. This is dumb. And incredibly sad. I've heard too many stories from people directly in my life that showcase the insanely unethical system everyone allows to continue simply for de-facto purposes. The only reason they exist is because we are too apathetic as a country to believe we can make changes and legislation that is actually FOR THE PEOPLE in this country. Please help. Please believe. Set your sites higher than some bullshit "boot-strap" platitude based on Reaganomics and Mad-Max bullshit and instead realize that Star Trek is the goal. Believe we can be better. This society we are living in makes fantastic, dramatic leaps forward in capability, technology and wealth every decade for over 100 years now. The only thing holding us back from sharing in it is our denial of the fact that the future is still steam rolling ahead, but our zeitgeist of selfish motifs about "Not in my backyard", "Don't tread on me", "boot-straps", 'immigrant demonization', and "Freedommmmm!" is at best a distraction from real conversation. At worst a self contradictory mesh of motives that equal nothing more than "Don't yell at me about making big-boomy noises when I want to" and "make liberals cry" blind inherited politics. Actual freedom to me is not being geographically paralyzed while pregnant because of health-care/job concerns. It's not having your final thoughts be about your families financials and how much your final days are "costing them". It's not having families with still-borns have hospital bill reminders for years afterwards. It's not having people ration their insulin and then still accidentally die because we as a country aren't willing to stop profiteering from a drug that was given away to the public by its inventor. That sounds like freedom from a tyrannical "rich" society who has no morals, to me. For the first time in my life, I'm about to have employee provided health care. At the age of 35. I have had a wildly successful, interesting, constant work life since the age of 16. And I have simply been lucky to have not been ruined by the state of healthcare in this country. That luck is not something to champion. I am an example of survivor-bias nonsense. This needs to be fixed. Small companies who can't compete with larger ones for labor would be great beneficiaries of health-care-for-all. Cutting out the needless middle-men of insurers, actually using regulatory powers to police vulture patent abuses, or eliminating the need for hospitals and small practices to hire more paper-pushers and insurance chasers than they do nurses are all examples of why study after study show it would save this country so much money and pain to ACTUALLY TRY TO FIX THIS PROBLEM. It's a fact that we pay almost twice as much for healthcare for worse results in this country. And the reasons are obvious. Please pay attention. #MedicareForAll |
The Author
is a thirty-something guy who hasn't been able to look away from politics since 2010. Around the time he got tired of staring at religion. Archives
June 2020
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