How Washington is screwing up health care reform – and why it may take a revolt to fix it

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Sick and Wrong

by MATT TAIBBI

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

Just as we have a medical system that is not really designed to care for the sick, we have a government that is not equipped to fix actual crises. What our government is good at is something else entirely: effecting the appearance of action, while leaving the actual reform behind in a diabolical labyrinth of ingenious legislative maneuvers.

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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/29988909/sick_and_wrong

[msongs]

1. health scare companies PREFER customers to die. what's so hard to understand? nt

[azbarq]

2. we will never get universal healthcare until the american govt structure is more democratic

the reason we do not have universal healthcare is because of the way that the american govt is structured. America has a presidential, strong checks and balances, federalist system. The power in our govt is deliberately vested in either unelected politicians (supreme ct and federal judges) or in politicians who are elected from large voting districts (president, senators and to some degree house representatives).

Virtually ALL nations that have a viable universal healthcare also have a parliamentarian system--where the power of the govt is mostly vested in the politicians elected from small voting districts. They have the real power.

for more on these ideas, google up an essay by woody holton using the phrase "excess of democracy."

[blindpig]

3. Facile excuse

Our government is structured the way it is for precisely the purpose of your complaint. It's working like a charm for it's owners.

The parlimentarian system, while marginally better, provides better cover for the owners by creating a better illusion. Yet the owners are still in charge. As long as the capitalists own the economy it hardly matters what kind of facade is presented, a facade it will remain.

k&r

[azbarq]

4. it is not an excuse; it is an observation

if someone says he can fly using his arms, and i cite the law of gravity and various equations on aerodynamics, that not an excuse. It is an observation, an analysis.

I want universal healthcare. I understand why we do not have it, and why we will not likely ever have it at this stage, not until americans understand how governments and democracy work.

If you want universal healthcare, you have to understand why we do not have it.

When a large portion of americans understands the principles of governance and the laws of democratic government, the hallmarks and characteristics of democratic govt, then, THEN we can begin the journey to get universal healthcare. At this point, Americans, even especially the most politcally aware activists on DU, for the most part do not even understand the foundations of democratic governance.

Man could not fly until he understood the principles of aerodynamics. When he began to understand aerodynamics, its principles, the laws of force and gravity, he was able to fly.

We cannot control our own government until we understand the laws of governance and democracy. I just stated the most important one and cited an essay by Dr Woody Holton, who is IMO the foremost expert on the subject. Why don't you do some reading if you want universal healthcare? Then we can talk....