The Gadfly would like to share a bit of personal history with you the reader. In early 2009 The Gadfly suffered a sudden, life-threatening medical condition which required emergency surgery to rectify. Fortunately, The Gadfly survived this affliction and is here today to share his dirty fucking hippie views of his experience with the "greatest" healthcare system in the world with knowledge seekers far and wide.
Why is The Gadfly imparting this information?
Education my friends - education.
The Gadfly came across this in-depth article in Time Magazine by journalist/lawyer/advocate Steven Brill called "Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us."
The Gadfly postulates that until you have read this article and fully understood it's core message, you have no clue whatsoever as to how utterly corrupt, arbitrary and ultimately immoral the for-profit healthcare industry is in this country.
Getting back briefly to The Gadfly's personal experience - the event which truly opened The Gadfly's eyes to what the actual priorities of the healthcare industry are came when The Gadfly was barely 4 hours out of major surgery and while still anesthetized found himself face to face with a very kindly, soothe voiced lady hospital official at his bedside. The matronly, soft spoken hospital lady proceeded to methodically inform The Gadfly precisely what expenses related to his surgery and hospital stay that his employer provided health insurance paid for and what it didn't. And as for the care not covered under said policy, the still anesthesia woozy Gadfly was asked to sign a promissory note promising to pay the out of pocket hospitalization expenses (somewhere in the range of $5-6k if The Gadfly's memory is accurate). The Gadfly blissfully signed the document, for in his narcotic induced state, he could have been signing a confession to the Lindbergh kidnapping for all he knew.
And sure enough - a few weeks after being released from the hospital, The Gadfly received a nice little, itemized bill in the mail. While the word "itemized" is used to describe this bill, The Gadfly is certain it was written in some form of alien code that only certain bean counting hospital staff members, who have received some form of top secret training, could decipher. Fortunately for The Gadfly he was gainfully employed and was able to pay off the out of pocket bill (with interest of course) over several years time.
Here is the bottom line - Steven Brill has dared to expose, in this Time article, the dirty not-so-secret secret which the corporate elites and our elected officials are either too afraid or too compromised through the political money machine to speak truthfully to Americans about.
Brill's Time article is quite long (around 30 or so pages) and it is pay subscription (for $4.99 you can get a free week of access and all of Time's archives - including this article) but believe me - it is well worth your time if you want to educate yourself on this wholly unique American travesty.
If you would like a condensed version, here is a video of Charlie Rose interviewing Mr. Brill on his PBS show: http://www.charlierose.com/view/content/12792
The specific words from Mr. Brill in that Charlie Rose interview which really blew The Gadfly's mind were - "health care (in America today) is not a marketplace . . . there is nothing free about that market." Those devastating words were meant to shove a big fat fist down the throats of the "free market" shills and their perpetually wrong visions of sugar plums and free market fairies who take care of and fix everything all of the time.
That being said, and more than anything, the thing that is truly fucking infuriating to The Gadfly about this horrible, yet totally preventable, health care crisis is that according to a 2009 study from the American Journal of Public Health, approximately 45,000 American citizens needlessly die every year for the sole reason of lack of basic, affordable health care. Think about that - that is the equivalent death count of nearly 1 and a half 9/11 terror attacks every month of the year all year long. That also equates to, if you care to do the additional math, since 9/11, 2001 -- 540,000 U.S. lives lost because of our high-priced, inaccessible (for too many) health care system. That is more casualties than the U.S. suffered in WWI, WWII and the Korean War combined! The Gadfly cannot even wrap his dirty fucking hippie mind around the sorrowful reality of this inhumanity and it truly makes him question whether America has the right anymore to claim the moral high ground on any issue as it pertains to human rights and human dignity.
Suffice to say that until the people of this country grow a collective spine and stop buying in to the lies and bullshit spoon fed to them from the likes of our current crop of bought and paid for politicians and the corporate scum and demand change or else -- things will go on as they are and eventually the whole house of cards will crumble in on itself. And if folks think we're in a world of shit now, you haven't seen anything yet.
Read Brill's article and share it. Educate yourself and then speak out.
----TFG
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