Public Option be Damned

Woman fails to trick
husband’s mistress into
having an abortion.

Public option be damned. Let’s have real health care reform. Bernie Sanders, Sherrod Brown, and Roland Burris have offered an amendment that would provide medicare for all. No one believes this amendment has a chance of survival. But why should it not? It is the most perfect solution to our dysfunctional health care system there is. It would provide a single payer system that would be less expensive, more comprehensive, simpler, efficient, and would solve the problem. You might think that in a so-called “civilized” society, leaders would jump at the chance to offer health care to all the citizens. Indeed, all other industrialized societies do. The U.S. is the only one left that does not offer universal health care in one form or another. Why is this? Because too many people, including most of our “leaders,” believe in free market capitalism. This means that private enterprise should be able to provide health care for a profit. But providing health care for profit is actually inconsistent with the goal of providing health care, because the way you make a profit is by not providing health care to those who need it most.

We seem to be unable to comprehend there are some things that are just too important to be left to the private for-profit system. Truly basic human needs, for example, are trampled under such a system. We have seen what happens when energy, for example, is left to the private sector, as in the California energy disaster. Corporate farming is another example of how private enterprise is destroying our soils and poisoning our environment. And the attempt to reform health care is an attempt to do away with the privatization of health care. If these privatization nitwits had their way they would try to privatize water (they have in some places) and no doubt if successful with that would try to privatize the air we breathe. As I have said previously, let them have private enterprise when it comes to things like cosmetics and fashion and other areas where human lives and happiness are not at risk. We should have begun with promoting medicare for all, and not merely have assumed that it could not pass. If our Democratically controlled House and Senate, and the White House wanted to do it, they could pass it now, solve the problem, and be done with all the debate and hassle and lies and nonsense that has surrounded the effort to reform health care. And we would have universal health care that would work for all, not just Insurance companies who have no business whatsoever meddling in health care in the first place. As far as I know the only benefit we enjoy from having Insurance companies involved in health care at the moment is that we do have some form of health care, although horribly flawed and in many cases useless. There is no need for this, none, nada, zip, zero. The goal should have been from the very beginning to get rid of the Insurance industries involvement in health care completely, and switch to a single-payer system like all sensible people do. We seem to have devolved from the brilliant minds that gave us our constitution into a bunch of dithering idiots who have lost sight of any interest in the common good. As I do not believe this has a genetic base, it has to do with a failure of culture. That is, somehow we have failed to produce and transmit the extra-genetic knowledge required to maintain a system that functions for all its members. This failure has been encouraged by the corporate powers and wealthy interests (including the MSM) that have successfully “dumbed us down” for years. Our “wise men” are now fewer than they were and are not listened to in any case. Thus for those in charge, there is no global warming, no damage to the environment, no problem with health care, energy, poverty, the “war” on drugs, or endless “wars,” no problem with our beautiful “democratic” government, everything is fine (unless it might be shown that it interferes with short-term profits). Why even worry about the future, Armageddon is right around the corner, we might as well rape and plunder at will. Like one of our local bumper stickers proclaims, “After we’ve logged this one we’ll move on to the next planet.” Or how about, “Hungry and out of work, eat an environmentalist.” My all-time favorite that I saw just at the beginning of the Iraq “war,” “Nuke their ass and steal their gas.” Of course one of the most popular recent ones is just plain “Sarah.” We have a lot of really profound thinkers around here. You could hear them a lot easier if it weren’t for those damn black helicopters coming down from Canada to steal our lawn chairs. Sigh.

in these high mountains
icy rivers run wildly
nothing contains them
they rage mindlessly
as the hot blood of lovers
Morialekafa