So, as a public service to those fed up by the current cronyist system, here are a few questions/counterpoints for those who are--culpably or ignorantly--amplifying the FUD machine by parroting its talking points:
- If Canada and the UK and all those socialist countries have such horrible health care, why does the United States have a lower life expectancy? Why are infant mortality rates higher here? Why do more women per 100,000 die in childbirth in the U.S.? And why, pray tell, do we pay such premium rates for the privilege of ranking so abysmally in such critical benchmarks?
- More to the point, if "socialized medicine" is so terrible, why do its opponents--I'm looking at you, Mister Mayor of Nine-Eleven--lie so egregiously about it?
- For the "I don't want the government making decisions about my health care" crowd: So....explain to me how having a faceless drone in a mega-corporation cube-farm make those decisions is any different. Oh, but wait! You can't vote CEOs out of office. That's the difference. Except that doesn't play into the FUD talking-points. Ooops.
- And, by the bye, if you're so effin' concerned about government intrusion, exactly where the @#$%^&* have you been these past six years while AT&T and friends were feeding your calls/data to Big Brother Bush? Did I hear any gnashing of teeth from you folks at right and center while the Bush Regime canceled your slice of habeus corpus simply by calling you an "enemy combatant"? Ummm, no, actually. Why? Because the FUD told you to STFU and not distract your Alphas from their naked power-grab. That's either hypocrisy or some extremely messed-up priorities--there's no third way about it.
So, after scraping those bits of stupid off the bottoms of our shoes, let's move along to some reasons why, from a capitalist standpoint, so-called "socialist medicine" makes sense. Understand, though, when I mean "capitalist", I mean it more in the Adam Smith sense. Not our current plutocratic feudal system, wherein its suzerains and satraps earn more in a year than some Third World countries.
- The current "capitalist" system is only benefiting a small segment of the economy to the detriment of others. Everyone else--assuming that they offer/subsidize any health benefits to their employees--faces increased premiums. Thus, they either take a direct hit to their bottom line, or they waste resources trying to re-negotiate, jiggle the plans, etc.
- If the business decides not to take the hit, it then loses an advantage in hiring better people. Which doesn't show up as a line-item on the balance sheet, but can take a company downhill in the long run. (You like working with morons? Keep arguing for the status quo.)
- Or, let's step outside the normal nine-to-five world. Let's suppose instead that you have a great idea for a business, and have been disciplined enough to accumulate the capital to survive its infancy. What, more than anything, is stopping you from quitting your job to get your new business off the ground? It's better than a guess that that consideration is who will cover you and/or yours if someone gets sick. COBRA doesn't apply b/c you left voluntarily. Big Insurance doesn't want to bother with your nobody chump change. In economics, that's called a "barrier to entry," which Big Insurance and its cronies have now created--not just within their own industry, but throughout an entire friggin' economy, peeps. And that, friends and bretheren, is an intolerable state of affairs, pure and simple. Intolerable even without all the noise that's made about small business doing the lion's share of job creation. Bottom line: If you want to speed along the WalMart-ization of every last business sector, please feel free to keep echoing the FUD.
- And, finally, it's time to chuck the myth of the free market in an age of mega-mergers. Thanks to a $200-million plus vote-buying spree in the late 90s, the line between insurance companies and financial services has been irrevocably blurred. That basically means that the decisions about whether to cover your treatment, what you pay for premiums, etc., are directly affected by the Wall Street pony-track. And if you honestly think that the fat years will even out the lean, you need to take a hard look at the dosage of your meds. This is an industry where Sandy Weill can collect over a billion dollars for leaving a mess for his successor (Charles Prince), who himself has been shoved out the door (after pocketing mere hundreds of millions, poor thing) for losing over six billion dollars, plus a fifth of Citibank's market value. Think that this won't affect Traveler's bottom line in some Enron-style account-jiggling? (I forget who bought out whom, frankly; suffice it that they are joined at the hip.) Think that the chastened likes of Weill and Prince will humbly return their salaries and stock options so that your premiums won't spike? Yeeeeah...
But that very question is precisely what must be addressed and debated. Right now, I'm not seeing much that would pass for public discourse. The proponents and opponents of so-called socialized medicine are merely lobbing volleys of talking points at one another. Basically it becomes a smackdown between the Michael Moore fanclub against the lobbyists of Big Insurance and Big Pharma. And that will get us precisely nowhere. As our premiums continue to go up and our coverage melts. That is, assuming that we can get coverage in the first place.
