[Peace-discuss] Fw: Health care news worth sharing

[C. G. Estabrook]

Wayne--

I agree that we're "being cheated and robbed by the health-care industry" -- 
just as we're being cheated and robbed by the auto industry and the banking 
industry (to take two examples at random).

But the solution is not to treat our own injuries and diseases -- any more than 
it is to build our own cars in the backyard -- or do our own banking by burying 
specie in the backyard (which'll get crowded, with all the cars back there).

The solution is to establish democratic control over each of these industries 
and run them for the benefit of all, not for the few who "own" them, as we do now.

Production for use, not for profit, means in the "health-care industry" that I'm 
treated on the basis of how sick I am, not how well-off I am.

I'm sorry I don't recall the Lord Buckley reference (altho' Laurie long ago gave 
me a collection of his stuff that might have it).

Re Robert Crumb, I'm afraid you're taking the attitude of Mr. Natural -- and I 
unavoidably that of Flakey Foont, who asks him, "But what does it all MEAN...?"

--CGE AKA FF

E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> The problem with "health care" and the 
> medical-pharmaceutical-insurance/liability industrial complex (the "health
> care industry") that has a stranglehold on so much of America is not who is
> paying for it, any more than the problem with the military-industrial complex
> is how those toys and chattels get paid for.
> 
> The modern day story of the Good Samaritan goes something like this...a 
> battered and wounded man is picked up by an ambulance driven by the "good
> Samaritan" and hauled to a hospital, THEN he falls among thieves.  Those guys
> on the Jericho Road were mere amateurs.  They missed the real opportunity for
> plunder.
> 
> Americans just don't seem to be able to "get it" that they are being cheated
> and robbed by the health care industry, which tends to drive tacks with
> sledgehammers because it makes more money that way.
> 
> We are being ripped off.  Robbed.   Cheated.  The hospitals and clinics are
> doing with a pencil what Jesse James required a gun to do. Americans are
> terrified about their health and afraid that they are going to die, and have
> a sense of entitlement that sets them up to be the natural prey of the
> healthcare industrial complex.
> 
> The answer to America's health care crisis is like Lord Buckley's bear dance,
>  so simple like the Jitterbug that it plumb evades.
> 
> I really don't expect very many people to come to their senses on this any
> time soon.
> 
> As Robert Crumb had one of his characters to say (in 1993) about America's
> integral decline and demise, " Yo' fo'fathers wuz some Bad Asses, but yo' be
> weak!"
> 
> Some body else will pay for my troubles.
> 
> On 5/13/2009 11:29 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> Obama’s Health Care Charade By Glen Ford 05/13/2009
>> 
>> President Obama has gone to extraordinary lengths to suppress advocates of
>> single-payer health care. He has choreographed a grand theater of
>> faux-change, in which he "seeks to create a façade of unity along lines
>> that do not threaten corporate power." The goal is to "sidetrack, possibly
>> for decades, the most broadly supported idea in American politics, today."
>> This "requires elaborate reconstructions of reality," starting with
>> "methodically erasing single-payer advocates from the picture, with the
>> enthusiastic collaboration of the corporate media." Thus, Obama and
>> compliant Democrats on The Hill stage "summits" and "public roundtable
>> discussions" on health care from which majority U.S. opinion is totally
>> excluded...
>> 
>> Obama’s conduct of the health care non-debate gives the lie to his supposed
>> credo – that he seeks to unite Americans around issues of common concern.
>> In reality, Obama seeks to create a façade of unity along lines that do not
>> threaten corporate power. He is determined to shut down the Left, and will
>> succeed in doing so as long as “progressives” persist in believing that,
>> deep down, this president is on their side.
>> 
>> Full article at 
>> http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=print/content/obama%E2%80%99s-health-care-charade
>> 
>> 
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> 
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