On The Wing

Editor’s Note: I love how the U.S. continues to allow for spiraling health-care costs to bankrupt not only hardworking middle class families but the entire nation.  People are going to get sick and need care REGARDLESS of whatever system we have. For all those opposed to reform, ask yourselves this question: What costs more, accessing emergency room docs and welfare clinics where the taxpayers foot the bill or having reasonable access to preventative care  where costs can be better managed and people can stay healthier? Don’t get me started on tort reform and the cost of malpractice – everybody sues everybody and the lawyers are the only ones who get rich. OK, I’m ranting. Ryn offers a better argument than I do, so read what she has to say.

Sick Over Health Care Reform

by Ryn Cricket

You want health care reform?  We’re not going to get it.  It doesn’t matter what the politicians say or what the public wants, we will never get a reformed health care system even comparable to many third-world or developing countries until we banish the idea of lobbying and lobbyists.  It’s not a political thing, it’s a greed thing.  The insurance companies’ goals are not to help us, they are the same goals of any and all companies –to make a profit.  We cannot get rid of the capitalist insurance system until we get rid of the legal bribing or the lobbyist system.

I live in Cleveland –home of the world-famous Cleveland Clinic which is in a neighborhood surrounded by government project housing, and rentals filled with people who can look at it, but never enter.  This past May, the National Association of Free Clinics organized a three-day free clinic at our county fairgrounds.  They had set up 300 volunteer doctors, nurses, dentists and ophthalmologists who would see people –no questions asked –on a first come/first serve basis.  IT was predicted that thousands of people would sleep in line for even more than a night waiting for the opportunity to see a free doctor set up in a horse stall or tent.  How is this better than a third-world country?  Who is fighting to keep this system?  (By the way, the clinic got canceled because of the H1N1 outbreak, which I find ironic, but there were other very successful clinics held all around the country.)

Let’s talk about “death panels” and all of those other stupid rumors that politicians, lobbyists and spin doctors created to push their own agenda onto what they thought were unthinking masses.  The reality is:  my parents wanted to get the H1N1 vaccine last fall, and they were denied at three separate places because they were over 64, apparently not a priority.  It wasn’t a question of insurance or money in their case, but unethical discrimination enforced by our “highly advanced” medical system.

I have classes full of international students who are shocked to know how much it costs to have a baby in America –even with insurance.  They don’t understand why it costs anything when in the majority of their countries in Asia, Europe and the Middle East, they get paid an average of $10,000 American dollars by their governments when they have a baby in their countries.  I won’t even get started on maternity leave, but I’m beginning to think that we are the only country in the world that does not support  people who want to have children and raise them well.

These same students also go through an interesting culture shock when they realize that if they are sick or hurt, they can’t just walk into any hospital or clinic, see a doctor right away, be given medicine and go home.  That’s how it is in their countries.  We may have the best doctors and best hospitals in the world, but they’re also the most expensive and inefficient.  What makes them that way?  Insurance companies.  Who keeps the system status quo?  Lobbyists in D.C. paying off politicians –on both sides of the aisle –to push their agenda.  And we could add that to our own apathy for sitting in our Lazyboys, drinking Pepsi, eating a Big Mac and not complaining.

So it’s nice that these government politicians with their five-star insurance and always enough money in their pockets for a damn co-pay want to pass a law that insurance companies can’t deny you if you have a pre-existing condition, but that’s not reform, that’s humane.  That’s sticking bubble gum in a crack on the Titanic.  Medicare for all –now that’s reform.  –But I also wouldn’t mind seeing the unemployment rate got up because a couple thousand lobbyists are out of jobs either.