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I am a loop-tape or broken record ad nauseam on this matter,<br>
but the problem with "health care" and "medical services" is not who<br>
pays.<br>
<br>
The problem is that these services, as a matter of business strategy,
are severely limited.<br>
The USA does not make enough doctors and health care workers. It is a
matter of <br>
strategy, boom dot bust supply demand market strategy. The medical
guild hides behind<br>
its facade of "we are the doctors, and you aint, and if you dont pay us
whatever we <br>
want, we let you die. So there."<br>
<br>
As the song goes, what they need is a "damn good whacking".<br>
<br>
it will take a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth,<br>
but what is needed is many many more doctors<br>
and a radical restructuring of the drug business.<br>
<br>
I, John Lettsom.<br>
Bleeds, blisters, and sweats 'em.<br>
If after that,<br>
They choose to die<br>
I, John, Lets 'em.<br>
<br>
<br>
On 7/5/2012 7:23 AM, David Johnson wrote:
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<p> </p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><b>by BAR executive editor Glen Ford</b></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">President Obama’s healthcare
plan, now vetted by the U.S. Supreme Court, is the spawn of Republican
reactionaries, “based on the principle that people should pay for their
own bodily maintenance.” It bears no resemblance to world-class
healthcare systems, “expanding the healthcare compact only for those
who are destitute, while turning everyone else into profit-centers for
corporations.” Obama has locked in the past, and put up a roadblock to
the future – just as the right-wingers that invented the “individual
mandate” intended. </font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"> </p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
color="#280099"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="4"><b>Obama
Bound for Mount Rushmore?</b></font></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><b>by BAR executive editor Glen Ford </b></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;" align="center"><font
color="#2323dc">“<font face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>Obama has succeeded
in passing the Right’s program, created to stop what looked like the
inevitable triumph of a single-payer system.”</i></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">President Obama, as his aides
will tell anyone within hearing distance, wants to go down in history
as one of the “greats.” Most African Americans, purely for reasons of
group affirmation, would also love to see the First Black President
beaming from Mount Rushmore (in the Black Hills of South Dakota, no
less!), alongside George and Thomas the Slave Masters, Teddy the Arch
Imperialist, and Lincoln the Emancipator. </font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">Most of the U.S. corporate
media – those who make the first drafts of history acceptable to the
ruling class – also want Obama to have a shot at a place in the
pantheon, since he has done some service to the rulers. The U.S.
Supreme Court’s vetting of Obama’s healthcare legislation, according to
the </font></font><font color="#0000ff"><u><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/29/us/health-care-ruling-may-secure-obamas-place-in-history.html?pagewanted=all"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><i>New York Times</i></font></font></a></u></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">, is a “personal
reprieve…leaving intact his hopes of joining the ranks of Franklin D.
Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan as presidents who
fundamentally altered the course of the country.” Obama has often
compared himself to all three, agreeing with Reagan that the Sixties
was a decade plagued by “excesses” – which, to Reagan’s mind, included
Lyndon Johnson’s expansive social legislation. </font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">As the </font></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><i>Times</i></font></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"> tells it, Obama has nearly
completed the work of his predecessors. “Not just Roosevelt and
Johnson, but Harry S. Truman, Nixon and Mr. Clinton all tried and
failed to move the country toward universal health coverage.” Obama’s
bill is historic because it “seeks to end the status of the United
States as the world’s only rich country with millions of involuntarily
uninsured citizens.”</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;" align="center"><font
color="#2323dc">“<font face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>Obamacare is, at
best, a detour, and more likely an historic setback to the movement for
a truly national health care policy.”</i></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">The </font></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><i>Times</i></font></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"> resorts to crazily contorted
wording to convince us the Affordable Care Act is the next logical step
in the civilizing of the United States; that it bears some resemblance
to universal health care as practiced in the rest of the developed
world – an outrageous distortion of fact and history. Obamacare, like
previous Republican healthcare schemes, is based on the principle that
people should pay for their own bodily maintenance</font></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><b>, </b></font></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">and that “free riders” must be
forced into the private pool. It expands the healthcare compact only
for those who are destitute, while turning everyone else into
profit-centers for corporations. That’s not the direction universal
healthcare advocates have been trying to go, all these years. It is, at
best, a detour, and more likely an historic setback to the movement for
a truly national health care policy. </font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">The first U.S. entitlement
programs evolved from pension plans for Civil War veterans and their
families. “By 1910,” according to the </font></font><font
color="#0000ff"><u><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.socialwelfarehistory.com/programs/economic-security-part-i/"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">Social Welfare History Project</font></font></a></u></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2">, “Civil War veterans and
their survivors enjoyed a program of disability, survivors and old-age
benefits similar in some ways to the later Social Security programs.”
In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the Social
Security Act, which also included provisions for unemployment
insurance. Harry Truman unsuccessfully proposed National Health
Insurance, starting in 1945. Lyndon Johnson introduced Medicare and
Medicaid with his Social Security Act of 1965. Ever since, the struggle
has been to expand these programs to the entire population, </font></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"><i>as a matter of right</i></font></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><font size="2"> – as was occurring globally
even in formerly “Third World” places like Taiwan.</font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;" align="center"><font
color="#2323dc">“<font face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>Even in the last
days of President Reagan’s reactionary rule, the trajectory of American
healthcare sentiment was arching towards universal single-payer.”</i></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;">“<font face="Times"><font
size="2"><font face="Arial, sans-serif">Entitlements” have been the
bugaboo of the Right since the New Deal. But even in the last days of
President Reagan’s reactionary rule, the trajectory of American
healthcare sentiment was arching towards universal single-payer – the
world-class solution. The Heritage Foundation, founded in the early
Seventies by arch-reactionaries, saw the handwriting on the wall – and
took preemptive action </font><em class="western"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-style: normal;">in 1989</span></font></em><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">. As </font><em class="western"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><span style="font-style: normal;">Chris
Weigant wrote in the </span></font></em><font color="#0000ff"><u><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-weigant/the-individual-mandates-c_b_1386716.html?view=print&comm_ref=false"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif">Huffington Post</font></a></u></font><em
class="western"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><span
style="font-style: normal;">, Heritage commissioned its Director of
Domestic Policy Strategies, Stuart Butler, to produce the Right’s own
“Framework for Reform” of healthcare – one that kept the profits locked
in and diverted the public from single-payer healthcare as a universal
entitlement. Everyone would be pushed into the “market-based” –
for-profit – pool. Stuart wrote:</span></font></em></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><em class="western">“</em><font
face="Times"><font size="2"><font face="Arial, sans-serif">This means
that, while government would take on the obligation to find ways of
guaranteeing care for those Americans unable to obtain protection in
the market, perhaps because of chronic health problems or lack of
income, Americans with sufficient means would no longer be able to be
‘free riders’ on society by avoiding sensible health insurance
expenditures and relying on others to pay for care in an emergency or
in retirement.”</font></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Times"><font
size="2"><font face="Arial, sans-serif">Republican Bob Dole ran for
president on an “individual mandate” health plan, the same concept
Romney implemented in Massachusetts. It’s also the Obama scheme, as
Chris Weigant concluded in the </font><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>Huffington
Post</i></font><font face="Arial, sans-serif">: “The individual mandate
which was included in Obamacare is so close to what Stuart Butler of
the Heritage Foundation initially suggested that we can honestly say
there is no appreciable difference between the two.”</font></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Times"><font
size="2"><font face="Arial, sans-serif">If Obama belongs in a
pantheon, it’s a Republican one. He is not completing the healthcare
project begun by FDR in 1935. Obama has, instead, succeeded in passing
the </font><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>Right’s</i></font><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"> program, created to stop what looked like
the inevitable triumph of a single-payer system under which most
insurance companies would go extinct. Just three years ago, it seemed
that the day had finally come for some form of Medicare-for-all, which
has long enjoyed the support of roughly two-thirds of the public. Obama
pulled a switch. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, a stalwart of the
Right who is young enough to keep his eye on the future, knew a good
deal for his side when he saw one, and signed off on it. He’s a lot
smarter than those deluded Lefties who want to send Obama to Mount
Rushmore.</font></font></font></p>
<p style="margin-top: 0.06in; margin-bottom: 0in;"><font face="Times"><font
size="2"><font color="#280099"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>BAR
executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at </i></font></font><font
color="#0000ff"><u><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com"><font color="#280099"><font
face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com</i></font></font></a></u></font><font
color="#280099"><font face="Arial, sans-serif"><i>.</i></font></font></font></font></p>
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