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CORPORATE PIMPS ABOUT TO SCORE BIG
YOUTUBE: HBO: REAL TIME
"New Rules with Bill Maher, Ronald Reagan and Greed are NOT Good 5/29/2009"
Cousin Bill gives 'em Hell.
WHY NOTHING GOOD WILL COME OF OBAMA'S HEALTH PLANS
The Whole Political System Is Rotten, And Must Be Reformed In Order To Get Anything Done
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When I was involved in real estate in New Jersey back in the 1980's, I met quite a few doctors who were investors in property. They didn't spend much time with patients. They were hustlers, not healers. They built professional suites and office condo's, labs and hospitals, clinics and medical centers, and managed and staffed them with healers, many of them junior hustlers, all working to enrich themselves, not the lives of their patients. This was the new corporate America, soon to be ruled by the CEO's of giant multi-national conglomerates and their lawyers, accountants, MBA's and "creative" financiers. Everything became about money, nothing had any value except in terms of money, not even peoples' lives. If you couldn't put a price on something, then it had no value. These people would do anything for money, and everything was valued solely in terms of money. It was the beginning of the pimping of America. It just seemed the most shocking in medicine, which used to be a humanitarian calling, not a giant whorehouse.
Here we are almost thirty years later, and the prostitution of America is almost complete. The government is now entirely under the control of the corporate pimps. They are about to finish corporatizing medicine with the help of their whores in government. Our very lives will be in their hands on a daily basis, and huge amounts of our money will be directed to the profiteering corp's by Federal law. Quality, accessibility and cost will all get worse, and there will be no effective oversight. We will have no say in how our money is spent. The pimps will rule. Universal single-payer national health care is "off the table." Only private profiteering remains.
As long as private profit is the primary motivating factor in our health care system, there can be no reform. Until public health and making good quality care accessible to all are the dominant motivating factors, the system is never going to work, except as a cash machine for the rich and the corporations they hide behind. It's the basic outlook, the underlying philosophy, the political economics of the thing that are wrong, and nothing will change until those things change.
It has already been demonstrated on a daily basis over many decades that the so-called free market cannot or will not provide good quality healthcare for all. I'm sure that major healthco's all have a chart or a graph showing exactly where the lines are: Those above a certain income level, "A," can afford the best coverage and provide the most profit, if the smallest volume of business. Those below that down to the next lower level, "B," can afford some coverage, at less profit but higher volume. At the very bottom level, "C," the government picks up the tab, but only up to certain income or age levels; but it can be finagled and boondoogled and shortchanged as long as there are no major audits or crackdowns, so it can be very profitable.
All those who fall into the gray area, "D," between B and C simply are not a source of profit to the healthco's, and will not be served. That's where the breakdown really occurs: Those tens of millions of people get sick but don't get treatment. They slow down or drop out at work, and make other people sick around them. They go to emergency rooms at the few remaining public hospitals as a last resort and receive the least effective care at the highest price, which they frequently fail to pay. The taxpayer ends up paying for himself as well as for the poor, the elderly, and the uninsured. Since our tax system has become more regressive, those who earn the most and can afford the best healthcare are the only ones really benefiting from this system, along with the healthco's. In effect, we have a national healthcare plan now, funded by the taxpayers. It just doesn't work for anyone, except the rich and the healthco's.
So it's us, the underserved, over-taxed and overcharged majority, against them, the inefficient, overfed, undertaxed minority. Politically, it would seem to be a no-brainer, if this were actually a democracy. But, as the Courts have accurately noted, corporations are people, in fact a higher class of people, and money is speech, the corporations' speech. So the minority has outvoted the majority consistently for many years and we do not have a healthcare system that benefits everyone today, as a result. Nor are we ever likely to, until we get corporate money out of the system.
That isn't going to happen until we get the corporate whores out of our government and our political Parties. Anybody who thinks that our mean old corporate Daddies are going to let us have just this ONE big lollipop, real universal single-payer national healthcare, or anything like it, is crazy. The corp's have no reason to give in. They own the whole system. Until we change that, there will be no substantive positive change in any area.
What we are really just about to initiate here is the biggest government boondoggle since the permanent war began in 1941. The same kind of Treasury-milking blank check that "defense" has gotten for almost seventy years will now go to the big healthco's. The result will not be free or affordable quality healthcare for all, but some scheme that commits us all to everlastingly ensure the profits of the healthco's by requiring us all to become their customers and pay whatever they require, directly to them and/ or indirectly through the government. There will be no efficiencies enforced or economies of scale, any more than there have been in the defense industry. The "public-private" model will only mean public moneys going for private profits, with questionable benefit for the taxpaying healthcare consumer.
Without universal single-payer national health care, there will be the opposite of reform. But it doesn't matter right now if single-payer or any other idea is on the table or not: As long as mixed-market democratic socialism is off the political table in this country, and as long as corporate money is on that same table, there will never ever be any real reform.
We're going to lose this. And that's a good thing. It will serve as a rallying point to re-take and restructure our political Parties and our political system. It will clearly identify those who are with us, the progressive majority of the American people, and those who are corporate whores. If our political system cannot do the job for us, then it will have to be changed. That will take time, and it will require a lot of effort by a lot of people. But if all those who are now working so hard to patch and prop up an unworkable system turn their attention to remaking the system itself, there is a vast number of Americans who will be right behind them. This is a fight we CAN win. It is a fight we MUST win.
(More at blog me no blogs.)
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