General Welfare

[RC]

One of the purposes of government is to provide for the general welfare of its citizens. Our Constitution specifically mentions
it - twice. Once in the preamble and again in the Article 8.

The Preamble that starts out; "We the people..." So it stands to reason the general welfare pertains... to the people.

You and I being people, are therefore beneficiaries of this general welfare clause. So it is a right guaranteed in the Constitution. However most of us are one accident, one cancer, one health problem away from bankruptcy because we have a For Profit Market Driven Health Care System that is broken.

We are having this discussion because our health care has been turned into a For Profit Market Based Commodity.

Profits over health. When our money runs out, we no longer matter to the health insurance companies. Coverage stops.

The whole rest of the industrialized world has gone to some form of Single Payer, Universal Health Care. None of them want to go back to what they had before. And for sure none of them want anything to do with our broken system.

The insurance companies made sure Single Payer was never even on the table in the first place. It should have been and it should be the major topic concerning health care reform. The other countries have already done the hard work of figuring out what works and what does not. All we would have to do is cherry pick from what does work from the other countries, then we could have the best health care in the world, instead of being #37 or so and dropping.

How to pay for it? That also is simple. With Single Payer, since you would no longer be paying exorbitant rates for hit or
miss market driven coverage, you could afford a modest tax increase, to pay for it. That would also mean more money in your
pocket. With Single Payer, businesses that still pay health insurance premiums now would have more money to operate on and/or to grant pay raises to its employees.

Also, our defense budget is bigger than the rest of the world combined. There is no reason why it needs to be any bigger than
Russia and China's defense budgets combined. None. The money saved can be used to pay down the debt and rebuild our own falling apart country, including paying for civilized health care.

[leftstreet]

1. K&R

[havocmom]

2. Exactly

but there just isn't enough profit for the few with General Welfare, so they fired him and went with General Disaster. Capitalism

[skorpo]

3. K & R

[KT2000]

4. K&R

[demodonkey]

5. Hear, hear. K&R nt