The bill for a recent, sudden illness and stay in the hospital was $67,403.23. I don't even have a fraction of that kind of money, but I am fortunate to be one of a shrinking number of people in the US with "health care." Even that oft-used term must be deconstructed.
But that my co-pay for my hospital stay was only $250 is a relief.
Why is the United States of America the only industrialized country without a public health care system? It's not for lack of talk, not for lack of Congressional hearings, not for lack of funds - we have plenty of all.
We are triangulated in this country by a party system funded, guided, and run by an oligarchy of capitalists. Support of the Republicans yields a perpetuation of this system; support of the Democrats yields the same. Writer Gore Vidal once called the Insurance Industry the Piggy Bank of the Rich. If this is true, it would explain why they have kept health insurance private, costly, and relentlessly advertized as the best in the World.
The worst example of what perpetuates this health care system is not from elites within this party system - they know their limits, so continue to frame the issue as "affordable health care" - but from Progressives. Respected writer and honorary co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America dissed Ralph Nader and backed John Kerry in 2004. The Communist Party USA has been favoring the Democratic Party lately, and this has made its magazine, Political Affairs, a depressing thing to behold.
There have been insurgents within the Democrats, but their fate has always been crash and burn: to date [late winter 2007], I have only heard Demcratic candidates John Edwards and fellow vegeatarian Dennis Kucinich define the solution as UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE.
I do believe Universal Health Care was First Lady Hillary Clinton's goal in her early endeavor, which is why she attemtped and was vilified for shutting out the oligarchy. Universal Health Care is not the goal of US Senator and Presidential Candidate Clinton, as we have heard. Our Press and Elites are fond of pointing to the real power behind the Iranian presidency, the Mullahs - these Islamic chieftains - but not the oligarchs that stand behind the thrones of the West.
In a recent, wide-ranging interview on C-Span, Ehrenreich said "The Alternative Health Care System in this Country is called TYLENOL." In fact, our so-called health care system is not about health but rather about chemo/medicine-centered industry, the power of which also keeps us away from a health-centered health care system.
A headache is not the body's deficiency of aspirin, and yet we are conditioned to be pill-centered in the treatment of our ailments. Our treament of many ailments - and it seems more are discovered everyday just when a new pill is concocted - are chemicalized. How often do you hear a discussion of our diet, especially in the US? Our heavy consumption of carcasses - excuse me, meat products - can be linked to the rise in disease, where at once time in the recent past our diets were more vegetable centered, less meat; and now it is the inverse, often no vegetation at all. Our animals now are even being fed animal products - the cow and bull are vegetarians by nature but are fed animal products and steroids and antibiotics to make them into the fattened creatures we've come to recognize as cattle.
Further, I learned during my extended hospital stay, that I had gotten a very special, dangerous bacteria in my intestines: campenella. This comes from chickens. Not to indict chickens, they are also fed steroid and antibiotics, and this is what makes these bacteria and fungus even more powerful: when they survive this chemical stew, they are resistant in your intestine as well.
So not only has our medical industry been chemicalized but so has food production, the long-term consequences of both scarcely discussed but met with the creation of more drugs.
After Reagan and Thatcher let for-profit drug companies into the universities research centers and starved them of public funds to work in the public interest, research has been geared to medicines not for the poor but for yuppies and the rich. Drug companies have quarterly reports and shareholders to always consider. They have no interest, fiscally, in drugs for the poor when the government won't pay full price for them or that the poor themselves cannot afford.
So while we should demand universal health care, this health care must be rational and address the planet, our food supply, and our diets primmarily. Drugs must be a last option. Prince Charles of the UK was recently heard to whisper to an Arab prince how McDonald's restaurants could be banned. The movie, "Super Size Me," would highlight this argument.
But people's needs will never be heard in an anti-democratic system, like the US, with its capitalist party system.
No comments:
Post a Comment