The Health Insurance Racket Is Manufacturing Entertainment Value from Pulling the Plug on Grandma
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Every day I get letters asking me to weigh in on the health care fracas. As if a redneck writer armed with a keyboard, a pack of smokes and all the misinformation and vitriol available on the Internet could contribute anything to the crap storm already in progress.
Besides that, my unreasoned but noisy take on this issue is often about as welcome as a fart in a spacesuit. None of which has ever stopped me from making a fool of myself in the past. So here goes.
There ain't any health care debate going on, Bubba. What is going on are mob negotiations about insurance and which mob gets the biggest chunk of the dough, be it our taxpayer dough or the geet that isn't in ole Jim's impoverished purse.
The hoo-ha is about the insurance racket, not the delivery of health care to human beings. It's simply another form of extorting the people regarding a fundamental need -- health care.
Unfortunately, the people have been mesmerized by our theater state's purposefully distracting and dramatic media productions for so long that they've been mutated toward helplessness. Consequently, they are incapable of asking themselves a simple question: If insurance corporation profits are one-third of the cost of health care, and all insurance corporations do is deliver our money to health care providers for us (or actually, do everything in their power to keep the money for themselves), why do we need insurance companies at all?
Answer: Because Wall Street gets a big piece of the action. And nobody messes with the Wall Street Mob (as the bailout extortion money proved). Better (and worse) presidents have tried. Some made a genuine effort to push it through Congress. Others expressed the desire publicly, but after getting privately muscled by the health care industry, decided to back off from the idea. For instance:
So why did American liberals believe Barack Obama would bring home the health care bacon? Because they live in an ideological cupcake land. It's a big neighborhood, a very special place where "Your vote is important" and "by electing the right candidate, you can change our beloved nation."
Most of America lives in that neighborhood, even though they've never personally met. It's a place where the shrubbery and flowerbeds of such things as "values" and "hope" bloom. Hope that our desires coupled with the efforts of a good and decent president can affect "change." Evidently these voters never heard the old adage, "Hope in one hand and piss in the other, and see which one fills up first."
The slaughter of the innocents by the health care lobby has pretty much extinguished the political usefulness of the word hope. Nobody, especially Obama, uses it now.
The first on-stage scuffle of the Obama administration, government-assured health care, quickly settled down into the accustomed scenario of very rich and powerful people in expensive suits "finding middle ground," otherwise known as the status quo.
Single-payer health care soon became "a consumer government alternative to private insurance," and is now "a system of health cooperatives. Next comes "slightly better health insurance (but not medical services) than before, from the same insurance companies but at twice the price; don't worry though, we're increasing your tax load so you can afford it."
See more stories tagged with: health care, insurance companies
Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War (Random House Crown), about working-class America. A complete archive of his online work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class can be found on his Web site.
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