Health Care for Profit
The Time Has Come for This Idiocy to Stop
Figure 1My Father's Copy of the
Constitution and the book "Children of Yesteryear" describing the war
in the Pacific where he served as a Marine Medic
The most totally absurd claim of the Tea party---the
main promoter of the idiocy of doing away with Medicare, Medicaid, and every
other humanitarian rules/laws---is that if people who get sick and are not
insured, it costs 5-10x as much as ACA. Result: since hospitals are run for
profit, and they take their 30% profit of the top, and spend what's left on
patient care, they raise the rates of those that have insurance to make up for
the ER loses. Health care is a 1.6 trillion dollar a year industry, THAT'S
RIGHT 1600 BILLION DOLLARS A YEAR. Thirty percent profit is a number beyond
most people’s comprehension. Health care is the biggest and most profitable
industry in the country, Even bigger than the Military Industrial Complex.
Have no illusions, we all get sick, no matter how good
your habits. Weakness to certain diseases are written in the genes we inherit
from our parents. To have sickness is to be human. This country has the most
sophisticated health care capability in the world. BUT ONLY THE RICH HAVE
HASSLE FREE ACCESS TO IT. This is an ethical and moral crime against all of
humanity. Exporting medical technology is our biggest money maker (at least it
was a decade ago).
Think about it. Through the philanthropy of people
like Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Michael Dell, children in Africa can get measles
vaccine, but children of poor parents in Texas cannot. Texas has slashed it
Medicare budget to the very marrow and ranks 51st (yes, less than the ghetto in
Washington DC), while having the 10th largest economy in the world. The
previous Governor, Rick Perry, refused 9.5 billion in essentially free money
from the Obama administration.
In effect Perry, who still considers himself a
candidate for President (what a joke--that's not funny) said to hell with the
children in Texas who get measles and suffer hearing loss, or who perish
(measles has a 5% mortality rate, as it weakens the immune system much like
AIDS and the die of pneumonia.). I know this from personal experience. I was
born in 1948 and had a bad case of measles. Missed 3 months of school and
developed pneumonia, but my father a medic for the Marines in the Pacific
recognized my illness and got me the proper medical care. I still have a
hearing loss as a common condition to measles victims. The current American population has no fear
or respect for vaccinations because the immunization system is so effective
they have never seen the ravages it used to inflict on children world wide, and
still does in developing nations. Same
mentality goes for polio which crippled or killed millions of children prior to
the Salk vaccine.
Americans are ignorant of the history of infectious
diseases, just as we are ignorant of history in general. The public schools are in a state of total
failure to educate our children with basic skills, yes even reading and
writing, and basic knowledge like history, geography, basic arithmetic, and on
and on. George Bush’s testing fetish set
the public school system back to the early 1800’s when there was no universal
education. The Methodist Church is
largely responsible for making elementary education available to all children,
and their system morphed into law requiring children to attend school. How many of you readers are aware of these basic
facts about the history of education system in this country?
When the Frenchman, Alex de Tocqueville, toured the
United States in the 1831, he was struck by the fact that no mater what dirt
road he traveled, the residents all read newspapers and were well informed
about current events at home and abroad. These impressions were recorded in his
book “Democracy in America” in which he attempted to inform their “fading
aristocracy” and an emerging “democratic order” which he saw as “an equation
that balanced liberty with equality.”
World map indicating literacy by
country in 2013 (2013 UN Human
Development Report and Individual statistics departments) Grey = no
data
World illiteracy halved between
1970 and 2005.
We take universal literacy for granted, but the above
graphs show a very disturbing trend world wide.
And now, with regressive governments like that of
Texas is attempting to throw all that away?
Texas spends less per student in the public schools that every state
except Alabama. A trip to Alabama is
like time travel to the early 50’s before the Civil Rights Movement. Go there today, and you will wonder if there
ever was a Civil Rights anything. There
is fortunately an alternative for those parents that cannot afford private
schools: home schooling, which is highly organized and is very effective. But it requires time and effort on the part
of the parents, and the many families that live hand to mouth with on or both
parents working two jobs, home schooling is not a viable alternative for many
poor families.
As Abraham Lincoln,the Father of Conservative politics
said: “The function of Government is to
provide for the people what they cannot provide for themselves.” By this standard, the Governments of Texas
and many other extremist conservative states, Government is failing miserably,
in fact so miserable that a revolution (meaning voting the Greedy Sociopaths
that govern the state in an sadistic manner).
Saddistic may sound a bit harsh to some, but to have a generation of
children doomed to being “wage slaves”, which is taken directly from the plot
hatched at the School of Economics at the University of Chicago in the early
‘70’s who misread the unraveling of America’s institutions as a flaw in the
Constitution, when the real culprit was television as precisely predicted by
Marshall McCluhan in the late 1950’s. McCluhan’s work was quickly forgotten and
he died in 1980. However, cutting edge
research by psychiatrists, geneticists, and neurologists revived McCluhan’s
writing as one researcher observed “heavy TV watchers have the same behavioral
characteristics as heroin addicts”, and another member of the team recalled
that McCluhan had written something similar.
Re-reading mcCluhan’s work verified that statement and the team changed
directions, and by 2003 had identified the mechanism by which the mental
illness McCluhan predicted. Sadly, even
though we know that TV is the culprit for America’s descent into a selfish
addiction to consumerism, the habit is so ingrained in our culture that the
hours of TV watched per capita is still increasing as of the most recent
census.
MORRIS CREEDON-MCVEAN, DO
A gentleman and a scholar
Austin, Texas
No comments:
Post a Comment