From the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

The UDHR was adopted by the United Nations in 1948 without dissent. The United States was a member at that time.

So, how are we doing? Despite constant criticism from the left, many progressive reforms from the past remain in force. We have Social Security, which provides retirement security for the aged, disability and survivor benefits as well. We have Medicare for the aged, Medicaid for the poor, the VA hospital system for veterans. We have unemployment benefits for the recently unemployed. We have Workers Compensation, which provides coverage for injuries and income replacement for loss of wages due to those injuries. (Workers give up their right to sue their employers for injuries as part of the W/C system.)

There is no right to food, though we have the Food Stamps program, which is substantial. We have minimum wage laws, but they are inadequate for a single-earner family, often necessitating a working spouse and child care expenditures. To assist low income people with children, we have the Earned Income Credit, which is substantial. We also have programs to assist with child care for the working poor. We have many homeless people, and private and public shelters for many of them, and soup kitchens. Virtually every public service has a provision for the poor and working poor, including utilities and bus rides, college tuition (a few grants and gazillions in loans available), and housing assistance. Most states offer breaks on property taxes for elderly retirees on fixed income.

We appear to be doing a pretty good job fulfilling the mandate of UDHR. Where we come up short is in the area of health care. With an employer-based system, employees lose mobility. Private insurance companies are bound to turn people away, and to inflict heavy overhead burdens on the system to protect their contractual prerogatives. Millions of people are under-insured, and in 2009 alone as many as a million people will suffer medical bankruptcy, with 60% of those thinking they had adequate insurance coverage. Millions more are uninsured, many by choice, many due to preexisting conditions, and others due to inability to pay premiums.

In summary, we have a wide array of social services available in this country. Most of them are under continuing attack by the right. We only need go one step further … universal health care provided by heavily regulated not-for-profit private concerns, or government.

For those of you who look at the left and say we never have a kind word, I beg to differ. Due to leftists who came before us, we have a wide array of benefits in this country for poor and disabled people. Just one step further now …

Each morning when I awake, my first task, in which I delight, is to read scripture. Even after all these years, I continually stumble on passages I had previous missed or misunderstood.

Example from this mornings’ wanderings in the Gospel of Mark (4: 3-11)

Jesus and the disciples traveled unto the Sommorah one day, and sought repast from its fishermen. While there, a group of the village elders put upon Jesus to give evidence of his divinity by healing a man whose body was covered with cankerous sores.

Jesus continued with his meal, failing to engage the elders, who became insistent, taking from Jesus the fish in his hand and imploring him to act. The disciples too implored the master to act, as evening was upon them, and shelter would not be offered if Jesus could not perform a miracle.

Jesus arose, and walked to the afflicted man. He looked upon him, and said to those around him “Verily, I say to thee, that a man shall not enter the kingdom of heaven lest his soul first be removed of cankers. And I say to this man that he shall see the kingdom, and his afflictions removed.”

He then turned to address the throng that had assembled. “Verily I say unto thee, that the works of my father on earth are here for all to see, but for those who will not see, I cannot provide. I cannot heal a man whose disease already exists, nor will I take upon myself the burden of healing him when he cannot offer up payment to the doctors and elders of the village.”

Now I understand.

Footnote: There is dispute (which has become heated at times) among scholars about the King James version, which uses the word “exists”, as it is derived from the Hebrew מעודכנת, which meant “medically extant”, but which was translated to Greek to mean אינטרנט, or “of being”. Modern American biblical translations have Jesus saying “Dude, it’s already there. Can’t fix it.”

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?

It appears that whatever changes this “health care reform” process brings about will be set up to serve the health insurance industry. They will get the two things they want most – subsidies, and mandates that we buy their products.

There is not much time left before the IRS begins demanding insurance certificates from us as part of our tax return. In the meantime, I think it a good time to inflict the only damage that we can. If you are reasonably healthy, take 17 months and 29 days off. Enjoy life, pay yourself a bonus for once.

If you are at risk, if you are ill and have insurance, hang on to it, and cash in on it to the largest degree possible.

Let’s temporarily turn the cash machine around. It is all we will have left after the Democrats are done reforming things for us.

I was once fake-employed in order to qualify for a group insurance policy for me and my wife through Aetna. Because my “employment” was in Colorado, and we lived in Montana, there were no networks available, and all of our coverage was with doctors of our own choosing. (Aetna limits which doctors you can see in Colorado.)

I did what health insurance and “free” market apologists said I should do with regard to my wife’s knee – I shopped it around. She needed a total knee replacement. I called Bozeman Deaconess to see how much it would cost, they couldn’t say. I called Aetna to see how much they would cover, they couldn’t say. But they did say this: They would only cover the primary surgeon, and not the assistant. I told the hospital about that, and they said they didn’t care, that they don’t do surgery without an assistant on hand. Since we were not in the network, we’d have to pay deductibles, co-pays, the assistant surgeon, and anything else the insurance refused to cover for any reason. Our exposure was open-ended, and so decided not to have the surgery at that time.

So we were smart consumers, and did just what Aetna wanted – we didn’t have the surgery on their watch.

Over the past ten years (or more) I’ve had quite a few interactions with people who believe in “free” markets, and unrestrained capitalism and trade. Many of these people believe that we are all isolated individuals, each of us responsible only to ourselves and bound to pay our way. Any program paid with public funds is a form of forced charity, and any tax on an individual a form of theft.

It’s an odd set of perceptions and, fortunately, only a few people carry things to such extremes. What stirs my curiosity is not the libertarians/Randians who carry these views, but rather those who take advantage of such ideologues.

In the health insurance business, people often make cold and calculated decisions – to reject people for coverage, to rescind coverage when someone gets really sick. But I’ve observed further in the business world that there are certain people whose whole life ambition is to “win” the game, to accumulate as much as possible. They don’t seem to care about anything else. They don’t care who they deceive, who gets hurt, who is bankrupted. Such people would feel at home in the health insurance business.

I suspect these people are sociopaths. Dr. Martha Stout, a Ph.D. at Harvard, thinks that as much as four percent of the population are sociopaths of varying degrees. Others put the figure lower, as low as one percent. The number might rest somewhere between 1-4%.

Who are these people? I’ve met quite a few, as we all have, though we don’t know it. We might think that they tend to go into the serial killing business, but most lead much more mundane lines. The military, the cops – those seem likely professions of choice, but cops and soldiers are on the lookout for them and try to keep them out. Oddly enough, according to John Seabrook (Suffering Souls
The search for the roots of psychopathy, The New Yorker, 11/10/08), most find a place for their life’s work in business.

Sociopaths don’t have much else to do but amass wealth. They don’t care about relationships (though are often good at faking them). For most of us, relationships take up a lot of time. For sociopaths, there are better things to do. It’s all about ‘the game’.

So “free markets” are a natural fit for sociopaths. Who wants rules and regulations? Who wants to be fair? Who wants to enforce an honest deal or protect a consumer? Free markets pit ordinary, kind, compassionate and trusting people against sociopaths, who know how to win. They accumulate fortunes, and want more.

Sociopaths intent on accumulating wealth usually manage to place themselves at pivotal points where money changes hands. So we have entrepreneurs who do nothing but scout for various business activities, whatever the current fad. They are not driven by lvoe of a product or inventiveness, but rather to be where the action is. They need to be in the game, to be doing something where there is active trade, to cash in, to make as much as they can, and then get out.

In health care it is likely sociopaths who don’t give a damn about health “care” and form insurance companies.Those companies, after all, make their money by denying health care to clients. Hence we have “Dollar Bill” McGuire of United Health Care, who collected $1.6 Billion in salary from that company for one year’s labor.

In the United States, more so than other countries, we tend to let these people have free reign. We look up to them. The mere act of amassing a fortune is seem as a sign of worthiness. Imagine the same amount of money amassed by thousands of people making a decent living by forming a labor union – that sort of activity, though it is essentially the accumulator’s act spread over more people, is frowned upon.

Wealth accumulators are not wealth creators. Quite the opposite. There is no harm in taxing them at high rates, of throwing them in jail when they misbehave. (I imagine that Bernie Madoff has some sociopathic tendencies.) In our strange world, a poor person goes to jail for stealing a pack of cigarettes,while people like Jack Welch, a man who ruined the lives of hundreds of people by sending tech jobs overseas, is honored. Then there is “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap, who makes his living by firing people. Do I suspect these men are sociopaths? Yeah, I do.

Of course I speak broadly, as many men (and women -oddly,most sociopaths are men) men are simply good at what they do and are normal in other ways to boot. But if indeed 1-4% of us are sociopaths, and if sociopaths have nothing to gain in love and life itself, then it is highly likely that they are the ones who put work themselves into pivotal positions to cash in on the rest of our labors.

I just got done attending a health insurance town hall here in Boulder – this one put on by Blue Cross of Colorado and New West Health Insurance. It was really something – there were angry policy holders there and people who had had their policies rescinded, and other people who had had claims rejected. But the most prominent complaint was this, voiced by a matronly lady:

My husband and I work hard – I have health insurance on the job, but I have to pay extra to have him on the policy. Right now we’re paying $600 a month, and our deductibles keep going up, and my employer keeps complaining about how expensive it is, so we can’t be sure that policy is always going to be there. My question is this: What about your own coverage? Do you worry about health care costs at all?

There was applause, and then silence. The CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield, Sherry Cladouhos, sat silently for a moment, and then said

“No – I guess I don’t really feel that. I don’t worry about that. I do worry about our costs, and we do oversee claims very carefully, but I have to say that we are often insulated from the problems of policyholders, and don’t empathize. So I thank you for asking the question, and pointing out part of our problem – that we who administer health care in the private sector have taken great pains to ensure that we never have to deal with policy holders. That’s why I’m here tonight. I go home tonight with a different attitude, and tomorrow morning, I am your employee.

Now admit it. I totally had you, right? You bit when I said that a private health care corporation would actually have a town hall meeting. Embarrassed?

Forgive me for mindlessly parroting a piece from the LA Times – this is as engaged as my brain will be for several days. Hope they don’t sue me – the content is 100% Greg Critser. Hard to pass up, though.

A quiz on how the drug companies interact with the healthcare industry.

By Greg Critser
August 9, 2009

With the pharmaceutical companies at the bargaining table on healthcare reform, and Congress considering new restrictions on drug advertising, it may pay to bone up on some facts about the industry with the following quiz:

1. What percentage of Americans over the age of 65 take at least one prescription drug on a daily basis?

a. 20%
b. 40%
c. 60%
d. 75%

2. In 2005, what percentage of all continuing medical education for physicians was paid for by Pharma?

a. About 25%
b. About 50%
c. About 75%
d. About 90%

3. Who told a congressional panel in 1983 that “we believe direct advertising to the consumer introduces a very real possibility of causing harm to patients who may respond to advertisements by pressuring physicians to prescribe medications that may not be required.”

a. The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission
b. The chairman of Abbott Laboratories
c. The head of the Food and Drug Administration
d. The head of the Consumers Union

4. In the same hearings, who said, “The potential pressures of public advertising of prescription drugs on the scientific decisions of the physician are both unwise and inappropriate.”

a. The chief of the FDA
b. The chief of Eli Lilly & Co.
c. The chief of the Sioux Nation
d. The chief of the House Committee on Science and Commerce

5. Who, in 1983, first proposed that the FDA roll back its regulation and allow drugs to be advertised?

a. The chairman of the FTC
b. The chairman of Abbott Lab- oratories
c. The head of the FDA
d. The head of the Consumers Union

6. In 2003, what did the head of Pfizer pharmaceuticals say was the key to the industry’s future success?

a. That “we should push as hard as we can to get patients to talk to their doctors about our newest drugs.”
b. That “we should give patients good, solid facts and encourage them to use logic to make their decisions.”
c. That Pharma “must move toward the emotional way of marketing, because in that way we can move toward the spiritual-ethical method.”
d. That Pharma should “really think about free Krispy Kreme coupons as a way of encouraging sales.”

7. Today, most new prescription drugs are expected to show profitability within:

a. 90 days
b. 120 days
c. one year
d. three years

8. According to the leading scholar on the subject of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Ritalin, a stimulant, became the leading treatment for ADHD because:

a. It was effective
b. It was safe
c. It was not called amphetamine
d. It made teachers happy

9. In 2002, who said “we are entering what could be the golden age for kids and pharmaceuticals”?

a. The head of PhRMA, the powerful pharmaceutical lobby
b. The head of Eli Lilly
c. The head of Pfizer
d. The head of the drug committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics

10. In ancient Greece, “pharmakon” meant:

a. An untrustworthy agricultural worker
b. A reformed criminal
c. A delicious beverage
d. Both “remedy” and “poison”

Answers: 1-d; 2-d; 3-b; 4-b; 5-c; 6-c; 7-a; 8-c; 9-d; 10-d

Greg Critser is the author of “Fat Land,” “Generation Rx” and the forthcoming “Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging.”