I give President Obama credit for firing the opening salvos in this battle for healthcare as a universal right of citizenship. He DID get the ball further than anyone else ever has in this country - including FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Carter AND Clinton. He also paid for it with the effective legislative agenda of his entire presidency.
Single-payer is the solution. This is not "news", nor is it "radical leftist thinking". Healthcare is what is needed, not health insurance, and the sooner we get to that ultimate conclusion the better off the nation will be.
Imagine for a moment that we created something called "breathing insurance". In order to receive the life-sustaining air that is required to live, you would first need to have "breathing insurance", and the people who collect the money you pay would have absolutely NOTHING to do with generating or providing the air to you. They would then hire some politically connected Shylock to act as the CEO of this criminal enterprise; and would reward him or her handsomely with large portions of your extorted money. He would in turn make sure that his political allies and cronies did everything they could to keep this corrupt and exploitative system running indefinitely.
In fact, these companies would only serve to act as parasites, sucking money out of the system and contributing nothing to it in any meaningful way. Instead of that money being used to more efficiently deliver air to high altitude locations or undersea settlements, it would instead go to fund the campaign donations and salaries of the very people furthest removed from the actual air as you can get.
Now the purveyors of this insurance would charge you monthly fees despite not actually providing you with ANYTHING - no air, no breathing masks, no assistance at all. They would then go a step further and they would try everything they could to cut off your air if you engaged in high-risk breathing activities - like running or jumping or, clutch the pearls....having sex (preferably with spousal OR non-spousal partners as may apply, and of whatever sexual orientation(s) floats your boat!!!!!). The minute you exerted yourself and needed the air the most, they would move to cut you off and let you die rather than provide the service they contracted.
Now, if our only societal response to such an egregious situation was to fiddle around the margins and try to make sure that the only thing we could ever improve was access to the INSURANCE instead of free and unfettered access to the AIR, then we would be a society of scumbags more suited to future ridicule than reverence. On the other hand, if we used that first step to advance further still - to cap the profits of the insurance companies and drive them out of the industry by making it impossible for them to pay off their donors and CEOs while competing with a non-profit public system that is cheaper and more inclusive than they could ever afford to be....well, THAT would be something worth fighting for, something to be proud of, something I am WAITING to see from anyone in the Democratic leadership for healthcare....before the right-wing freaks and lunatics take back power and eliminate even the meager gains in insurance access that have been made...
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