Steven Franklin has graciously allowed me to post his original OP to my original health care thread
because I felt it needed to be read by more eyes.
Premiums are protection money paid to legalized extortion rackets, who then allow you to keep most of your stuff – house, car, pre-Columbian art collection, et al -- if something serious (i.e., expensive and maybe requiring hospitalization) happens to you.
Medical insurance has nothing whatsoever to do with health care except in the twisted minds of Chicago School libertarian fanatics and profiteering free market pitchmen. Break that nonsensical, artificial link, dump the idea of for-profit medicine entirely, replace it with a single-payer, universal-access system and spread the risk over the entire population in the form of a modest, progressive tax.
In other words, take a hint from the rest of the modern world where people pay far less per capita for their health care, never see a bill from a doctor, hospital or a goddamn insurance racketeer, and whose systems consistently produce hard, unambiguous numbers that rip the US lies and fantasies to shreds but which remain a complete mystery here in Dumbfuckistan because nobody seems to want to hear incontestable evidence showing exactly how gullible and easily conned they are. Bad enough being a dumb shit and functional illiterate without being exposed as a dimwitted rube, too.
And here's the final insult: We suck at keeping our own people healthy although we spend far more money pretending to try than any other country in the world. Here's some stats (
http://apps.who.int/whosis/database/core/core_select_process.cfm) I got from a sort on the World Health Organization database and, lookie there, the US spends more money as a percentage of GDP than any other country in Europe or the Americas.
Which is bad enough, since all these other countries spend far less and still provide universal access to quality health care for all. But then you look at this chart (
http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html) and see that the US ranks 37th in the world in overall effectiveness of its health care system -- right ahead of that medical nirvana, Slovenia.
There's no possible way to put a happy face on a system that allows bottom-line-driven public corporations to profit by selling access to health care providers for those who can afford the premiums, deductibles, copays and the rest of the bullshit charges -- while denying access to those who can't, which is literally imposing a death sentence on an estimated 22,000 Americans every year. Or so it says here.(
http://www.urban.org/publications/411588.html)
Happily, some are making out like the successful criminals they are.(
http://www.theindustryradar.com/index.cfm?account=radar&page=Healthplan_Executive_Compensation) Warms the heart, doesn't it?
The US lack of commitment to social services that benefit its own people is so stark compared with actual civilized countries. And it's all about money and profits. There's no other reason for such a dysfunctional system to even exist, much less become the model for a medical scam that never tires of thumping its collective chest and declaring its superiority to anything else in the world.
And why would that be? Because it's American, goddammit, and that's all that's required to claim the top spot in anything. Or so I'm told by delusional fools and TV-trained idiots who cling desperately to a mythical national self-image that hasn't existed in at least 35 years.
USA! USA! USA! Perfecting the art of systemic suckage, because we owe it to the children.
Cheers,
the former wp, finally sick and tired of a decade spent cowering behind various noms de guerre and now writing as Steven Franklin, which happens to be my real name -- or close enough for gummint work.
sf
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