Healthcare Again

Can someone tell me what the healthcare reform would be sans a public option?

I'm dead serious? How is it any different? What changes? What makes it better for those in desperate need of care?

There will never be a bipartisan solution. Forget that. Anyone that tells you it is possible is a fool. The far right is just digging in their heels on the hope that the left will blow all their political capital by the next election. Then they (the right) can cackle that the "reform" failed.

What is needed here is for the left, the real left ("blue dogs" are merely dixiecrats in disguise) to seize this opportunity and to cram the reform down everyone's craw. To take the will and use it the way their counterparts on the right always do; the way left used to know how to do.

That's what it takes in the US. It's what it always takes to get things done here; to get things past a group of people that are, as a general rule, neophobic. It takes a few people of vision, power and conviction to break the status quo so severely that returning becomes an impossibility without total societal breakdown.

If you try to take the gradual change, there will be constant fighting and petty, tit-for-tat reversals.

It is almost akin to an intertial thing. If the will is expended strongly enough, the ball can be made to roll such that by the time the opposition can gather any will, it is almost unthinkable to the public to change back. Those on the center-left (the real left is nearly non-existant), take note of what those on the right have done over the last 15 years.

And the politicians in control of the reins: this is your time to say you amounted to something. That you stood and said, "We will make the change, damn the costs." Yes, your career will be on the line. But if you are obsessed with building a long political career, you will let yourself focus on your short term gains (the next election) over the long term gains of the greater good. And if you play it right, if you push and this succeeds, well, you can then feed your vainglory by knowing your name will get etched down among those others that decided that what was right was far more important than what was right for them.

Big talk from someone with nothing to lose? Perhaps. Keep in mind I don't stand where you stand. I serve my duty by taxes, voting and making my opinion known. By standing up and criticizing not only those for whom I did not vote, but also being critical of those for whom I did.

To paraphrase: We chose to do these things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. This is our Moon Shot. This is our great chance to finally yank ourselves again towards the top. To be the exemplars of change and progress. To admit that, yes, we are flawed, but we will fix our flaws.

Feh, healthcare reform without a public option. If that's the way we want to go, we may as well not even try. The system will still be broken.

There are times and places and things upon which we should compromise. This is not one of those things.

Healthcare as a Business : Broken Idea

I think of all the talk recently about the overhaul of the US healthcare system, one point made on Midmorning a while ago, sticks with me: when did people cease to be patients and become customers?

That's a question I'd dearly like to hear answered. I'm a patient, I am ill, I am going to a doctor/nurse/etc for care. I am not interested in buying healthcare services, I am interested in care. I don't want hospitals and other providers of care to be profit motivated.

Why? In all my reading and experience, anything that goes to profit motivation eventually falls into the myopic whims of idiots with more money than sense. Penny-wise and pound-foolish becomes the rule of the day. The enterprise self-destructs as if its management is some sort of insidious cancer. Best case example I can think of: ATT; not the current one, the old one. Read a bit on it.

In my own personal experience, all the nurses in my family (the good ones anyways), didn't get into nursing for the money, to service customers. They got in it to help make people better, or at least, hurt less.

I think the debate on this whole topic needs to be reworded. And the financial hand-wringers need to shut up. It will cost some in the short. But in the long, it will be cheaper as we all become healthier and need less treatment over time. We need to care for each other, to provide care to patients. We don't need to provide services. No options but a public option: sure, let the current companies manage the handling of paperwork and such, they already know how to do it.

I no longer want to hear free-market fantasies on healthcare. I don't care if the upper 1% can't get their third ivory back scratcher this year. The upper 1% has, by and large, never really "re-invested" or "created jobs". This is myth, pure and simple. They've "re-invested" just enough to keep their private, buffered and pampered life-style. You want proof: take a drive through the Hamptons, or Beverly Hills, or West Palm Beach, or Grosse Point, provided you can enter past the community gates.

0xDEADBEEF