Health Insurance is harmful to our health....

Why the "health insurance' debate is killing us and bankrupting the country...

INSURANCE What does it really mean?
11-30-16

For more than 20 years, I've coached, cajolled, corrected and emphatically insisted that the news media and politicians quit conflating "health insurance" or "insurance coverage" with actual Health Care delivered successfully to patients.  This is especially important for those who could not otherwise afford or locate any suitable care but it is even more important to the economy as a whole, and to our very survival as a nation and system of government.   A nation whose health care access and outcomes is below that of many 3rd-world countries has no business setting any sort of example, or attempting to control the destinies of other nations.

The total collapse and de facto expropriation (by corporations, lobbyists and the governments they control) of our once-great health care system will puzzle historians for centuries to come.  How could we have been so stupid?   Why do we let these gangsters control and profit from the most basic charitable humanitarian and necessary services - Health Care.  Physicians, Hospitals, Clinics, Public Health standards and services, etc.?

And most mystifying of all, why do we submit to monopolistic, profit-maximizing control over the quantity, variety, and quality of our vital services?   It's an Economics-free Zone.   No one here had heard of supply and demand, competitive pricing,  or the Sovereignty of the Consumer.   A real free market system means no patents or monopolies, no ability to coerce people to pay for what they don't want, or what they think is harmful to their health, etc., etc.

You can still practice (with its own certification process)  "alternative medicine" in Montana (acupuncture, homeopathic and herbal medicine, etc.), but it's not "recognized" for Medicare or Medicaid reimbursements.  Some treatments, which are popular and cost-effective, like Chiropractors, are included.  And since most lower-paid workers now spend a third of their income on compulsory insurance (thanks to the Democrats), they have no resources left to obtain alternative medical services, but at least that's a convivial system where you can trade work, barter, or otherwise get by.

The Republicans didn't push for Romneycare precisely because it wouldn't work unless it forced the young and healthy to pay for the old and sick (something which Pres Obama has repeatedly used as a "justification" for this system - it is forced altruism, which we are told is good for us.).  And Mitt said, repeatedly, that it was a system for Massachussetts liberals who were in favor of such programs.  He knew it wouldn't work in most of the rest of the country, where the dominant elements are "fighting socialism" along with any other sort of benevolent government action, which they think is the road to totalitarian despotism.  Now, why would they think a thing like that?  Maybe they've been to Montana.

As for the despotism, they're certainly cool with that, and each party plays off the fears of "the other's guy's despotism" - whether it is the other major party, or foreign despots who use the terror instilled by American imperial violence to tighten their control over their own people.  (c.f., Turkey).   Maybe they can act out some of their James Bond or Matt Helm fantasies.   In any case, their main mission in the legislatures and state bueaucracies is jobs, raises, more programs, more prisoners, more people on welfare and government health care schemes, all of it corporate and local-oligarchy friendly.  If it's not a rip-off, they don't want to fund it.  (Check your local School Board, for examples).   In the end, they're all promoting failure on the side (in other words, hedging) in order to prove themselves correct (and thus blameless) in their analysis after the fact.

Republicans are more sensitive to people's "libertarian" desire to opt out of any federal program they don't like, and to find their own cost-effective solutions to whatever needs they might have.   The two leading "architects" or proponents of the ACA - Sen Max Baucus, and now, Bill Clinton whose Democrat faction was still "building on" Hillarycare, c. 1993, have described it as "a train wreck" (Baucus, omitting who was driving the train - himself) and "the craziest thing I ever heard of", verifying my
estimation that we are now paying 4 times more than we need to, and still have rotten health care with co-pays and "insurance" deductibles we simply can't afford, so we still don't get the health care we need, or if we do, we are driven into bankruptcy.

It is indicative of the state of the news media that these meaningful statements by people who (perhaps belatedly) understood that a disaster had occurred, were immediately ridiculed or forgotten.  The basic question as to whether or not we want to subsidize corporations with our health care dollars, rather than spend them on actual health care, has never been discussed, and those who tried to discuss it, like Green Senate candidate Margaret Flowers, were actually arrested at the order of our dear Sen. Max Baucus for attempting to present these facts at a hearing (at many hearings, for trying to deliver materials directly to the White House, etc., etc.)   There is no excuse whatsoever for this discussion to continue in these terms.  The "insurance model" has totally failed, and proven to cost 4 times more than it should, with some 2-3 million people employed, and somewhere north of half a $trillion wasted and thus removed from providing not only health care, but any other government service which we are now so often told "we cannot afford."