Let Them Eat Snake (how to cow de cuss of medicine)

Or How Little Private Health Insurance Has Done For This Country

So far our health coverage in this nation has gone from emetic to pathetic. In my early life my mother was our family's only doctor. She dispensed emetics and other bad tasting medicine as needed. She also bound our childhood wounds and we healed the rest of the way by ourselves. I had one visit to a doctor between one and twenty and he saved my life with a penicillin shot.

The microbes that almost killed me were part of an infection that nearly took over my body after it was severely weakened by Whooping Cough. I guess that would make them an opportunistic infection. Doctors in those days often treated you even if you had little or no money. We had none. My mother lived to ninety without any help. She tended not to trust physicians much. You used them if you absolutely had to, otherwise you sucked it up.

Now I am looking out on a nation where private health coverage is woefully inadequate. The premise that employers will take the responsibility for heath care for their workers is false and foolish. Meanwhile the Right has the right only wins strategy. It is right for children and parents both to go untreated if they do not have a health problem dire enough to force them to go to the Emergency Room.

It is right for everyone in the young and healthy category to pay insurance costs for an aging population through our Medicare Plan but have no equivalent coverage for their own kids. It is right for all of the untended people to get sicker until they are ill enough to need a lot of care to cure simple conditions. It is right for our health care system to be a burden on the heads of all our entrepreneurs and businesses. It is not right, it is stupid!!!!

This argument has gone on forever and it is still smoldering. Meanwhile massive insurance companies have grown up around this unmet need. Do you think they add no cost to this ridiculous system? Let me see, the arguments against a publicly funded health care system seem to be of two categories. One is the; “It's not my problem,” category. The other is the, “Government will add too much cost to the system category.”

Wake up and smell the iodine for crap's sake. We are inventing the medical care of the future here in this nation. We do great research and have terrific capabilities. Only when it comes to distributing that care sensibly do we fail. I have bought a lot of health coverage for a fair number of people that worked in businesses I ran over the last forty years. The insurance plans available to businesses have totally stunk for the last twenty.

I have been in charge of the choices my family made up to the point when I just went on Medicare last year. Now I can finally relax. Oops we need a private plan to go along with Medicare now. What genius thought that mess up? If you look at the private health insurance industry's record and compare it to that of the government you see a vast difference. Take the VA system for example. It offers better care than any private health plan and costs less to administer and operate. Looking at the real numbers disposes of the cost argument quickly.

In a world where we are saving AIG weekly now and CITI and, (How long do you want this list to be?) is socializing medicine for the health and well being of the people a false step? I have been an entrepreneur all of my adult life and I think that is a sheer and utter bullshit argument.

I have spent millions of dollars of my own, my workers and my investors money buying woefully inadequate coverage while this system has gotten progressively worse and more costly. If you do not want to participate in funding this nation's health care cost move somewhere where they have none for a while. Like Detroit for instance. Oh yeah, that's right, there are nearly eighty million of us without adequate care plans right here. Never mind just open your damn eyes.

Today with people losing jobs and the nation losing industries faster than we can count them we need a new answer. If your arm gets mangled enough by an explosion they still have to remove it. Radical surgery is called for here, not some puny attempt to leave things as they are in health care. If the right blocks this effort by Obama to solve a real problem they will lose another election. And another, and another until they wake up and smell their own rotting head.

The gangrene has taken over the right side of the brain politic. It is time to excise their vision-less approach to the needs of people from our system for a while. Luckily it will grow back without any radical stem cell treatment required. But we will all be healthier by then. You can take that to the bank if you can find one that doesn't need government aid and health care of its own.