The Hippocratic Joke: Congress Hates you and Loves Insurance Companies

It is estimated by the Institute of Medicine that 18,000 Americans die every year becuase they don't have health insurance. In the last 12 months six million people have lost health coverage. That's just about seventeen thousand every day. These are the worries of working people in America. The current situation in this country is a tragedy. People are forced to choose between medical bills or their children's education, forced to choose between spending time with their family or working a second job to get "adequate" health coverage, forced to choose between maxing out credit cards on emergency room visits, or just letting the wounds or diseases, or fractures heal themselves.

In one of his latest pieces published in the Wall Street Journal Columnist Greg Zerzan wrote about the fiscal contention between a public health care option and the U.S.'s
current military budget. He articulated his worry saying "a nation's government can fund a military with worldwide presence and state of the art weaponry, or operate a nationalized health-care system. It can't do both." Multiple polls confirm that the same percentage of people who oppose the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq want universal health care. It's obvious to a large majority that it's time for a reallocation of resources in America.

The 'free' market has us in chains, it's unsustainable and undemocratic. "There are...no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market...in health care, the free market just doesn’t work. And people who say that the market is the answer are flying in the face of both theory and overwhelming evidence." This is a quote from Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman, he was honored in 2008 for his analysis of trade patterns. This isn't Karl Marx bellowing from the pages of Capital this is a left-leaning capitalist saying no to the free market! We need to stop engaging in debates with people who regurgitate anachronistic free market slogans, or people who storm town hall meetings and scream that with government-run health care "death councils," bureaucracies, and lack of freedom in choosing doctors go hand-in-hand. The irony is that we already have a system like this in place, they're called health insurance companies.

The question remains: how do we get single-payer health care like Europe or Canada? Democrats have proven to be cowardly, unorganized, and unreliable when push comes to shove on policy. When a bill is advocated it is a train-wreck full of loopholes and compromises. The latest plan that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proposes undermines the "public option" from the get go. Instead of having the new health care system make payments at the adjusted medicare rates they'll have their fees equated with large insurance companies. This is completely convoluted, 31% of every dollar you spend on insurance goes to CEO salaries, profits, paperwork, and overhead this accounts for the exorbitant rates you and I pay for 'health coverage.' Canada's national health care systems overhead is 1%. It's time for the people to organize for a better system.