It constantly dumbfounds The Gadfly as to how obstinate and self-injurious Americans can be when it comes to safeguarding their own best interests. Take for instance basic health care:
CONWAY, Ark. — Kim Little had not thought much about the tiny white spot on the side of her cheek until a physician’s assistant at her dermatologist’s office warned that it might be cancerous. He took a biopsy, returning 15 minutes later to confirm the diagnosis and schedule her for an outpatient procedure at the Arkansas Skin Cancer Center in Little Rock, 30 miles away.
That was the prelude to a daylong medical odyssey several weeks later, through different private offices on the manicured campus at the Baptist Health Medical Center that involved a dermatologist, an anesthesiologist and an ophthalmologist who practices plastic surgery. It generated bills of more than $25,000.
“I felt like I was a hostage,” said Ms. Little, a professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas, who had been told beforehand that she would need just a couple of stitches. “I didn’t have any clue how much they were going to bill. I had no idea it would be so much.”
Ms. Little’s seemingly minor medical problem — she had the least dangerous form of skin cancer — racked up big bills because it involved three doctors from specialties that are among the highest compensated in medicine, and it was done on the grounds of a hospital. Many specialists have become particularly adept at the business of medicine by becoming more entrepreneurial, protecting their turf through aggressive lobbying by their medical societies, and most of all, increasing revenues by offering new procedures — or doing more of lucrative ones.http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/health/patients-costs-skyrocket-specialists-incomes-soar.html
Imagine that - in the course of a 24 hour period, a minor medical issue has the potential of leaving someone more than $25,000 poorer.
Every other civilized, modernized country on the planet has found a way, with wisdom and foresight being the driving forces, to provide universal health care to all of their citizens.
At this juncture, it has become quite obvious that the only factor holding back America from doing the right thing and either instituting a single-payer plan, or just outright nationalizing the clearly failed current healthcare system, is unadulterated greed.
There is nothing "exceptional" about the wealthiest country on the planet that has 50 million of it's people who have no access to affordable, basic health care. There is nothing exceptional about a country where an unforeseen catastrophic injury or illness can leave an individual, someone who previously would have been considered a productive, working member of society, bankrupt and destitute.
The Gadfly knows personally of people who have full time jobs with medical benefits, but who, for the astronomical price of out-of-pocket costs have driven down to Mexico to have outpatient dental and medical procedures performed. It's insane.
What's also insane is seeing these Teabagger types waddling around at their protests waving signs that say, "Keep Your Hands Off My Medicare!"
To which The Gadfly, if he were to be conveniently present at one of these delightful gatherings, would impolitely inform them - "Hey you ignorant chumps! Do you have even the slightest clue as to who it is that provides your precious Medicare and how it is funded? Pull your block heads out of Fox "News'" ass long enough to be exposed to some reality and truth for a change."
It is unfortunate that we have to have this level of discourse about something that most of the rest of the world considers a basic human right, but it is what it is. And like most of the other major socioeconomic issues of the past century or so, such as civil rights, labor rights, women's rights, environmental, public health & safety, and middle class economics, etc... the conservatives are belligerently determined to be dragged kicking and screaming to the progressive point of view, which, as history has shown, has consistently been the more moral, equitable point of view.
Furthermore, the bottom line is that habitually being on the wrong side of history, has not been a winning political formula for the conservative movement. And the rise of the Tea Party does not appear to have altered that losing formula at all - in fact, the Tea Party's national approval ratings are hovering around the 25-28% range - the same range that George W. Bush left office with.
But the GOP is at a crossroads. They created the conditions for the rise of the Teabaggers by coddling their open bigotry, their hostility toward women, their open hatred of immigrants (legal or otherwise), and their outright loony tunes, conspiratorial insanity as it relates to Barack Obama. By all accounts, Obama probably should have lost the 2012 election considering the state of the economy at that moment, but when the all important bloc of independent and swing voters contemplated the consequences of giving the Tea Party even more political power than what they had already achieved, they shuddered at the thought and decided to hold their noses and pull the lever for Obama.
And the same thing is now happening with the healthcare debate. The Gadfly acknowledges that the Affordable Care Act is a shitty piece of legislation, but not for the immature, simplistic reasons that the Teabaggers think so. And you won't find very many progressives arguing that point. But the alternative of doing nothing and just letting an already failed system deteriorate even further, and fail even more Americans, made no sense and so the prevailing mindset for pushing through the ACA was to make a first step towards reform and go from there. That is what has happened, and it is, albeit not without some problems -problems mostly because of intransigence of GOP state governors and legislators - slowly beginning to produce some positive results.
Ultimately people need to make a choice - do you support a political party that really and truly does not give a rat's ass that 50 million of their fellow citizens have no access to basic affordable care, that the system is slowly collapsing under the weight of it's own inflated costs structure, or that a major illness or injury could easily bankrupt people who are covered by health plans, or, are you going to support those who think that that is a pretty shitty way to demonstrate to the rest of the world just how "exceptional" of a nation that America is, and who feel we can do a whole lot better than that?
Decision time.
----TFG
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