Health care reform, day two

Some additional points on the health care crisis and Obamacare:

• Access to health care has never been a problem in the upper reaches of our society, but the model, private insurance, is held together by government glue at its weak points, access by seniors and the poor, who are unprofitable.
• The free enterprise model, which only exists on chalk boards, cannot provide expensive products to poor people. In the muddled minds of its adherents, it has to be the fault of the poor, who are left to die.
• The same for us seniors, but we are mostly financially better off and white, and so have enough clout that Medicare came into being.
• Medicaid, the remedy for the poor, has always been under attack, and the fact that it even exists is a tribute to progressives of a bygone era.
• For so long as the poor are visible, Medicaid will exist. Most people have consciences.
• Obama was hired (in part) to rescue the private insurance system. He did so by the only possible means: protect it from competition (no public option), and subsidize it.

Will it work? Of course not. But more importantly, even as it does not work, will it continue to exist? For a time yes. Democrats, blinded by party politics, will see to that. And for so long as they do that, they will prevent us from solving our health care problems with the only workable solution: Single Payer.

I say “only.” Some systems, like Britain’s and the VA, are government-owned and run. They work well, though Britain’s is under unrelenting attack from it’s right wing. Only it’s mass support keeps it running. Switzerland, which uses private insurance, is workable, but only because their insurance companies are so heavily regulated that they are virtual slaves to the system. So single payer is not the only solution, but in the US, the only workable one because it can be embedded in our patchwork private care system, as are Medicare and Medicaid.

Both of those systems are strained, as they cannot control outside costs imposed by an unworkable private care system with its hundreds of cost-shifting mechanisms, everyone running around trying to dump their costs on others. (VA is exempt from that, and so is remarkably efficient.) So single payer, when it comes to the US, will not be a shining model of efficiency. It will take decades to rid this system of its internal contradictions.

But this needs to be understood: we need to build a platform on which our society can function and where families, especially our young people, have a fighting chance. That platform will guarantee everyone two things: access to health care, and access to education. That’s what they do out there in the civilized world.

Those two societal functions are being eaten alive by the scavengers of the so-called free enterprise system. Until we cage them, we are nothing but chattel. Our youth, those who have jobs, are chained to their desks by student loans and the need for health care, and so are virtual slaves to employers.

We are not a free people. But the remedies are before our eyes. If real leaders step forward, and if the CIA doesn’t murder them, we can fix these problems.