bankruptcy

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via Medicare for All: Yes We Can | CommonDreams.org

by Holly Sklar, Published on Saturday, September 26, 2009 by CommonDreams.org

More Americans die of lack of health insurance than terrorism, homicide, drunk driving and HIV combined.

Grandma could be dead from lack of health insurance before she turns 65 and gets Medicare – 80 percent of first-time grandparents are in their 40s and 50s.

America is the only country that rations the right to health care to those 65 and older.

Lack of health insurance kills 45,000 American adults a year, according to a new study published in the American Journal of Public Health. One out of three Americans under age 65 had no private or public health insurance for some or all of 2007-2008…

…Even with health insurance, many Americans are a medical crisis away from bankruptcy. Research shows 62 percent of all bankruptcies in 2007 were medical, a share up 50 percent since 2001. Most of the medically bankrupt had health insurance – the kind insuring profits, not health care…

…Wendell Potter, CIGNA’s chief of corporate communications until quitting in 2008, testified to Congress, “The status quo for most Americans is that health insurance bureaucrats stand between them and their doctors right now, and maximizing profit is the mandate.” He said, “Every time you hear about the shortcomings of what they call ‘government-run’ health care, remember this: what we have now … and what the insurers are determined to keep in place, is Wall Street-run health care.”…

…Contrary to myth, the United States does not have the world’s best health care. We’re No. 1 in health care spending, but No. 50 in life expectancy, just before Albania, according to the CIA World Factbook. In Japan, people live four years longer than Americans. Canadians live three years longer. Forty-three countries have better infant mortality rates.

All these facts, all this red meat, and I can find no potatoes, no completeness.

You could put all this in a book, take the book to the halls of Congress, and smack every Senator and Congressman you pass on the head with it and you will not change their minds. It’s like telling the truth to an inquisitor. Unless it is what they want to hear, then it is all a lie.

Democratic Party leaders have this bone in their brain that compels them to think that if they don’t act like Republicans, no one will love them. Republicans have long been associated with helping the rich, and now the Democrats, the working man’s champions, are in that same boat. The solution to this convolution is obvious and it has two parts.

The first part, is that there is too much corporate money being passed to these politicians and their PACs. If we had national clean elections as does Arizona, which are a way to control the amount of money politicians spend on themselves to get elected, then politicians would be more concerned with representing the people and acting on the majority opinion than what their electoral prospectus ciphers out to be.

The second part is term limits. In this typist’s humble opinion, members of Congress should be limited to two terms of four years each, like the President, for both Senators and Congressmen. If this takes an amendment to the Constitution, then so be it. The drive to get reelected trumps the majority opinion – job preservation is the motivator behind making law and that should be a crime.

We can bask in the dreamy dream land of Medicare for all and sip our drinks by the pool in an idyllic setting, but the dirty, ugly, dusty, concrete truth is that there is nothing in that notion that would make the fat cats richer, so there is no political will for it.

…Tell President Obama and Congress, Yes we can have Medicare for All. Rep. Anthony Weiner’s amendment would substitute the text of the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act (HR 676), which has 86 co-sponsors, for House legislation HR 3200. Like the even worse Baucus bill in the Senate, HR 3200 would feed for-profit insurers more customers without providing the universal health care Medicare could provide at much lower cost…

Write and dial until your fingers turn blue. Nothing will happen. We did not elect Rep. Dennis Kucinich as President although he ran for it and we could have. We elected another DLC-like centrist who acts like he wants to be the head of both parties.

We could have elected Dennis, who wrote HR 676, if we had voted for him, but we were too caught up in the rapturous voice of change to think about our progressive dreams and who could take us there. We formed Barrack Obama in our image and projected on him the picture of a progressive savoir when all along, underneath it all, he was and is a fence-straddling centrist with his own agenda.

So go for it. Call every member of Congress, write them letters, send them email. I’ve done some of that. I’m still waiting. While you have them on the phone ask them what they think about limiting their own terms in Congress and limiting the money they can raise for reelection. You might get a laugh.