[Dialogue] health care reform

[W. J.]

Colleagues,

I've been continually amazed at your silence on the wildfire 'debates' on health care 'reform' in the USA. We did hear from Bob Rafos up in Canada, but very little else.

Especially with the travesty of 'town meetings' across the country this month, which were highjacked by the right wing nut cases eager to exploit the obvious lack of a participatory methodology for real proposals for reform. Where were the ICA types when we needed them??

Enjoying our 'retirement', you say?

Well, what about being part of the Medicare generation (at last), with the widespread fears that 'death panels' (thank you, Sarah) will ration health care at the end of life, and that extracting bloated, inflationary expenditures from the only government-run sector of the system (apart from the VA and Medicaid) will reduce the quality of senior care? Still asleep on that one?

My own view of what sustainable health care will have to look like has evolved to the point where Obamacare looks like a rerun of Hillarycare--a complex hodgepodge of Bandaid fixes designed to keep the present system up and running, maintain a robust private for-profit sector that skims Medicare/Medicaid, include more people under the private insurance 'umbrella' (remember the travesty of The Travellers/CitiCorp merger?), and still preserve access to healthcare as a privilege of citizenship/economic affluence rather than a human right available without 'co-pays' to all who enter the system, including those who sneaked across our borders to harvest our food for minimum wage and no health benefits, and who get deported (via expensive international Med-Evac flights) to third world shacks rather than treated for expensive health conditions by our public hospitals, our healthcare safety net of last resort.

Yeah, I know that was a long, complex sentence, but the new healthcare reform bill is gonna be long and complex too.

If you want a fairly understandable example of the problem, in which the highest health care bills are extracted from one of the poorest populations in the nation, please read:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/06/01/090601fa_fact_gawande

More later, but this is a start.

Marshall
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