Health Care

Since I haven't written anything in a long time, I just felt the need to get something out here. Let me begin with the Health Care debate that has been raging for over a month now.

For starters, there isn't really a Health Care debate. What there is, sadly, is a Health Insurance debate because the Democrats are too cowardly, the Republicans too crafty, and the American people too stupid to really fix this problem. What we need, first and foremost, is a single payer system for the entire country. Every legal resident of the country should be covered for any necessary medical procedures. Doctors should be reimbursed by a Government controlled agency funded by tax dollars.

No other system proposed would be able to fully cover the entire country as efficiently or as effectively as a single payer system. Today, dozens of insurance companies spend tons of money on redundant paperwork and advertising that would be unnecessary under a government run system. There would also be far less paperwork for the doctors and nurses who waste countless healthcare hours filling out forms to get approval to run tests.

The notion that people don't want the government to come between them and their doctors is ludicrous, not only because we are happy to let the government come between us and a fire, or between us and a criminal, but also because it seems to imply that there is no one between you and your doctor today. Wake up America, that's the insurance company. I would be surprised to find someone who did not have a first hand account, or a close family member with one, about how an insurance company prevented them from getting the treatments they needed without overly complicated paperwork and telephone calls.

As Dr. Dean said, there is virutally no one out there saying we should get rid of Medicare, so why is there so much opposition to expanding Medicare to all Americans? That is what a single payer system would be. It would be a form of Medicare or VA healthcare for all Americans in every hospital.

It is just such a sad thing to see so many people fooled and misinformed about the Health Care reforms facing the country. Sadder still that Senator Kennedy, who fought so long and so valiantly for a single payer health care system, did not manage to live to see it become a reality.

Give us Single Payer now!

President Obama, ladies and gentlemen of Congress, I impore you, give the American people a single payer health care plan now! How can anyone honestly frame an argument that a system run for people by the people, without a need to earn profit, can possibly cost the tax payers more than a system that is driven to maximize profits at the expense of health care services?

I laugh every time I see one of those "we have government health care and it's bad" ads on television because for every person that organization can find that talks about being denied treatment or long wait times, I'm sure Michael Moore could find 100, or even 1000 who were denied necessary treatments due to decisions made by unaccountable bureaucrats working for the big health insurance companies and HMOs. Have Americans really already forgotten their own experiences with privately run health insurance? Are Americans really so foolish as to believe those scary recordings by Ronald Reagan about the government shipping your doctor to another town?

Take a look at Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Scandanavia, or any other developed nation and you will see a health care system that not only provides excellent coverage for the people, but does so for far less per person than our broken system. I will always give the GOP and the conservative lie-machine a tremendous amount of credit for consistently tricking the masses of this country into supporting policies that negatively affect them, while propping up the big, corrupt, corporations that those "ordinary joe" politicians pretend to oppose.

Don't get me wrong, the democrats are not perfect on this issue and have caved in to so much of the conservative pressure that the result is a center/right of center initiative that will likely be labelled by the stars at Fox News as "the most socialist and/or liberal proposal ever put before the American people." When you hear Karl Rove and Newt Gingrich say these words, and they will, it's not because they've analyzed the plan and researched previous initiatives and came to that conclusion. It is solely because they believe that using that language will once again trick the American public to oppose something that is demonstrably in their best interest.