Let’s start with the obvious: American has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It’s become black leprosy eating away at the American experiment – a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn’t be equal to dreaming it up on purpose. The system doesn’t work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic legislation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it’s a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they’re sick with incurably expensive illnesses.
The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable – and that’s the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won’t get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.
Thus beings an article by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone – it’s a devastating critique of medical insurance companies, which are eating our lunch, and the Democratic Party, which is destroying our hope.
It’s not on line as of this writing, so get the magazine (very interesting article in there too on the breakup of the Beatles). Well worth the cover price.
Why is it that in this sick and twisted country the only ‘news’ reporters that actually report on and challenge power are employed by a fake news show on a basic cable network, and the only writing that reports accurately on the politics of health care is a magazine dedicated to rock and roll?
Are our institutions so corrupt that others are filling the vacuum?
Piece of Mindful 
He’s not kind to Max.Of course, i can’t agree with him, or you, but it’s a good read.
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The vacuum is so far being filled by Obamas and Testers who correctly diagnose the problem, rhetorically attack corruption, and then settle into a life of denial and corruption without batting an eye. The big question seems to be: will the disenfranchised get back up, dust themselves off, and fight another day outside, and against, the plastic make-believe political world Democrats and Republicans have constructed. It’s devastating to all who got sucked in. The media hunts down, marginalizes, and undermines any and all pro-democracy alternatives that pose any threat to the corporate-owned duopoly.
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Agreed – true reform is only possible outside the parties, but that is not part of the American makeup anymore.
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