The most recent depressing development in the War Against Ourselves Concerning Health Care was reported this week when a growing number of doctors declared they will no longer accept Medicare patients because the government is cutting their payments.
Republicans, Tea Partiers, Faux News followers, right-wing extremists, Second Amendment fanatics, and other assorted nut cases, I’m ready to join your anti-government screed on this issue.
That is, if you agree that any savings in health care expenses should NOT be born by the doctors who deliver our care. Unlike health insurance companies, physicians have invested heavily in time and money to contribute to the health and well-being of us all.
Contrast this with Anthem Blue Cross, a giant health insurer with no purpose other than serving as a middleman to skim money from the system. Anthem heals nobody, can’t give a flu shot, does no research into cures for diabetes or cancer, and couldn’t hook up an IV if their life depended on it (though ours often does.)
Why do we in this country allow the likes of the health insurers to hijack our system and make our health care more expensive and our lives more miserable? The insurers contribute NOTHING to the good of the country, or to the health of its citizens.
I think we can all agree that we are unique among the developed nations, and even some Third World countries, that we pay too much for our health care and get too little in return. The statistics are daunting. The most recent estimate is that 59 million of us now go without health insurance, up from 46 million just a few years ago.
Health insurers have taken a necessity, like water and electricity, and monopolized it for profit. When we will we awaken, take up arms (hooray for the Second Amendment) and extinguish these thieves once and for all? Health insurers should be regulated like public utilities, which is exactly what the Obama Administration has tried to do with its reforms.
“Obamacare,” as the Right Wing has dubbed it, is NOT socialized medicine, but a long-overdue attempt to put some much-needed rules in place to reign in the worst practices of the health insurance tyrants.
So Annie get your gun, and let’s go after these outlaws.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Saturday, November 13, 2010
At Long Last, I Understand
I am old enough to have studied history long before the State of Texas was able to hijack the publishing industry and rewrite the textbooks to propagandize their fundamentalist right-wing agenda.
But though I read history texts untainted by Texans back in the 60s, I never really grasped, at a gut level, how Germany could have fallen prey to the Nazi plague. After all, most of my ancestors are German, and their descendants are the salt of the earth.
My contemporary German relatives are God-fearing Midwesterners who say grace before they devour their homemade chicken and noodles. They don’t just pass away. When they write their obituaries, they enter into the arms of their savior or ride the wings of an angel up to the heavens.
These are decent folk who keep clean homes. They don’t cheat on their taxes (though they’ve been known to cheat on their wives), and they are frugal to a fault.
Still, at worst my German ancestors participated in one of the most vile movements in the history of the civilized world. At best, they simply ignored atrocities carried out in their name.
How could they have bought into a movement so evil?
Plainly and simply, they were angry, afraid, and looking for someone to blame for their diminished status after their economy was devastated by World War I. Pretty much like what we see going on in the U.S. these days.
Which makes me wary of what lies ahead as I watch the anger of the Tea Party foment into a combustible stew poised to lash out at the most convenient scapegoat they can find. Their target is always The Other, just as the Nazis scapegoated the Jews.
Today’s Tea Party targets are Brown or Black, most often, and practicing an unfamiliar religion that has been demonized by politicians in the War On Terror, which is just a euphemism for empire-building, theft of natural resources on another continent, and reducing labor here and abroad to a cheap commodity.
God help us all.
But though I read history texts untainted by Texans back in the 60s, I never really grasped, at a gut level, how Germany could have fallen prey to the Nazi plague. After all, most of my ancestors are German, and their descendants are the salt of the earth.
My contemporary German relatives are God-fearing Midwesterners who say grace before they devour their homemade chicken and noodles. They don’t just pass away. When they write their obituaries, they enter into the arms of their savior or ride the wings of an angel up to the heavens.
These are decent folk who keep clean homes. They don’t cheat on their taxes (though they’ve been known to cheat on their wives), and they are frugal to a fault.
Still, at worst my German ancestors participated in one of the most vile movements in the history of the civilized world. At best, they simply ignored atrocities carried out in their name.
How could they have bought into a movement so evil?
Plainly and simply, they were angry, afraid, and looking for someone to blame for their diminished status after their economy was devastated by World War I. Pretty much like what we see going on in the U.S. these days.
Which makes me wary of what lies ahead as I watch the anger of the Tea Party foment into a combustible stew poised to lash out at the most convenient scapegoat they can find. Their target is always The Other, just as the Nazis scapegoated the Jews.
Today’s Tea Party targets are Brown or Black, most often, and practicing an unfamiliar religion that has been demonized by politicians in the War On Terror, which is just a euphemism for empire-building, theft of natural resources on another continent, and reducing labor here and abroad to a cheap commodity.
God help us all.
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