(no subject)

[dreamer_easy]

I'm dubious about opinion pieces which paint an entire part of the political spectrum with one brush, which The Republican Party Is Turning Into A Cult, over at the Huffington Post, arguably does. But it's worth skipping over those exasperated opening paragraphs to the meat of the matter:

"The US is the only major industrialized country that does not provide regular healthcare to all its citizens. Instead, they are required to provide for themselves -- and just under 50 million people can't afford the insurance. As a result, 18,000 US citizens die every year needlessly, because they can't access the care they require. That's equivalent to six 9/11s, every year, year on year. Yet the Republicans have accused the Democrats who are trying to stop all this death by extending healthcare of being "killers" -- and they have successfully managed to put them on the defensive.

The Republicans want to defend the existing system, not least because they are given massive sums of money by the private medical firms who benefit from the deadly status quo. But they can't do so honestly: some 70 percent of Americans say it is "immoral" to retain a medical system that doesn't cover all citizens. So they have to invent lies to make any life-saving extension of healthcare sound depraved."

(Emphases mine.)

(Bet you wish you hadn't got me interested in this stuff now! Sorry, guys...)

ETA: That 18,000 figure is solid - it's from the Institute of Medicine. And, as the comments folks are leaving here are making clear to me, that's just part of the picture - even if you can afford some insurance, you're still likely to be looking at huge medical bills. No wonder (and that Huff Post op-ed should have acknowledged this) there's a consensus in US politics that this is wrong and needs fixing.)

Comments

[karjack.livejournal.com]

Until that 70% who say it's immoral to retain the current system gets fired up and stays fired up, the system isn't going to change. There is too much money changing hands between politicians and the medical industry. It's too profitable to write off 18,000 citizens who, let's face it, are probably too poor to matter in our wealth-obsessed culture. The worst of the disruptions are coming from paid protesters, and I'll give you one guess who's bankrolling them.

As a chronically ill American, I will never be eligible for private insurance. My health plan, as it stands, is to hope I don't ever need a treatment I can't administer myself. I cut my finger badly a few months ago, and since I couldn't see bone, we decided not to go to the emergency room. Communities hold raffles here for poor kids to get life saving surgeries they'll otherwise be denied. I consider myself a peaceful person, but the next time I hear a Republican whine about how they don't see why their tax dollars should pay for someone else's health care...

One positive I see in all this is that I don't think the old system will last. We tried health reform in the early 90s and it failed, but a few things have changed since then. First, the insurance companies have gotten even worse so more Americans are mad about it. Second, the Internet has put more Americans in contact with 'ferners' than ever. Americans are looking out and seeing that we aren't the envy of the civilized world. We're seeing that other countries are getting it right and that they... feel sorry for us? Ouch. Kind of makes the old lies harder to maintain.

I think the Americans who want change just have to get louder about it. In theory, being on the side of basic human decency should be enough, and yet...

Ahem! Sorry to spam your LJ. This is a topic in which I'm rather invested.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Americans are looking out and seeing that we aren't the envy of the civilized world.

That's a good point - I wonder if that's the thinking behind the lies about Britain's NHS.

[karjack.livejournal.com]

It's the same old lies as before. It's just that now the lies are spreading across the world within seconds and British people are able to weigh in on what's being said. Of course, for the isolationist wing-nuts who are just want to 'win' at all cost, their words won't hold any weight whatsoever. But for the people who honestly want to know what's going on, those voices are so important. Fifteen years ago they wouldn't be heard in numbers large enough to matter. Now, it's a different world, and thank goodness for that.

I've made progress in discussions with family just by being able to give a layperson's second-hand account of, say, Australia's system, because I've got an Australian friend, and we talk about this stuff. Without the Internet to facilitate those discussions, it would be harder to make a case. There have been some interesting posts around LJ (I'll link them if I can find the again) where Americans have talked about their health care experiences in counterpoint to non-Americans discussing their experiences. The differences are very illuminating.

[wyldemusick.livejournal.com]

Yes. There's a definite subset of Americans who would like to see the Canadian and UK systems go down in flames, mainly as a validation.

Big Pharma and the insurance companies would like to see all the public systems crash and burn because it would mean they'd be able to jack up prices worldwide and make even more obscene profits.