The Best Health Care Is Reserved for Congress

The following is excerpted from Chapter 2 of Practicing Medicine Without a License! The Corporate Takeover of Healthcare in America.

Nothing happens in a political vacuum. Nothing. The toe bone is connected to the head bone. Healthcare's place in a country agenda is but a microcosm of where a nation ranks its social consciousness. It reveals the quality of our purpose, our economy, our priorities and where they are placed on the chain of command. Along with education, healthcare tells all about a government and its people.

For without a healthy and literate people, a society cannot succeed. World history has proven that over and over again. Where then does America stand on the ladder of accomplishments when stacked up against the rest of the nations of the world? Sadly, with all of its opulence, power, wealth, and resources, nowhere near high enough.

U.S. foreign aid

For openers, we have often bragged about how generous we are toward the rest of the world as measured by our foreign aid. Politically, it is no secret that we base our aid not on need, but on its service as a tool of our foreign policy. Countries that are friendly to the U.S. power structure are the beneficiaries of our benevolence. Thus, the nations that receive by far the lion's share of our foreign aid are Israel and Egypt, the two nations in the Middle East boiling pot that are most politically aligned with our ideals and ambitions.

If generosity has been properly defined as the giving of what you have little of, then in that context, no matter how benevolent we might seem, we are not a generous nation. Even now, there is that brouhaha over our rehab funding of Iraq. Revelations come daily of contracting through the Halliburton empire and other corporate friends of the Administration, based not on value or need, but on the size of contributions to the various political campaigns or their political connections.

Despite our reputation, the numbers betray it as false. For although we have been ballyhooed as the world's foremost social worker, the truth is sadly the opposite. The United States of America continues to give less overseas aid as a percentage of its Gross National Product (GNP) and income than any other developed nation. With the exceptions of aid to Israel and Egypt, we allocate and spend more in one day on the military operation in the Gulf War than we spend all year on social foreign aid. Likewise, here at home, the Pentagon spends more in fifteen minutes than is federally funded for women's healthcare in a year! Other similar examples abound.

We fall behind most other industrialized nations in just about every area of social need. In percentage of one-year-old children fully immunized against polio, we are number seventeen. China and even Brazil are in front of us. There are lower rates of low birth weight babies born in Egypt and Jordan than here at home. Before the debacle of 1989 that took away its socialized healthcare, the then-USSR was also ahead of us on that list. Lebanon, Libya, and Cuba have more teachers for their children than the USA.

Oh, yes. We are first among western industrialized nations when it comes to percentage of children living below the poverty line, murders of males between ages fifteen and twenty-four, in the number of handguns in the street used by people of all ages, the percentage of citizens incarcerated, energy consumption per capita, and in the emissions of air pollutants.

And, we are by far number one in the rate of people gunned down each year in street crimes and similar violent incidents. In America today, there are more African-American adult males in jail than in college.

Shameful statistics

The World Health Organization (WHO), the arm of the United Nations (UN) that is in charge of the world's state of health, as well as its monitoring and reporting, has often reminded the U.S. that we lag far behind other G-7 countries, including Australia and Canada, in what the WHO states is "healthy life expectancy." Its latest report suggests that there are many "Third World pockets" within U.S. borders. I remind you that over 45 million Americans have no healthcare coverage at all, and it is easily estimated that over 40 million more have healthcare that can only be described as inadequate. Of course, as expected, much of this follows along racial and ethnic lines, with blacks and Hispanics over-represented among the denied groups.