Watching Bill Moyers speak about Afghanistan, as he wrapped up, he brought up a fact that I doubt many of us are aware of. He said that each 1,000 troops in Afghanistan cost Americans around a billion dollars a year. $1,000,000,000 a year.
So, lets do the math there. Each soldier we field in Afghanistan in a very real sense, costs us ONE MILLION DOLLARS EACH YEAR.
Let us just stop for a moment and ponder something else. Lets remember some other real, tangible costs of this. The human costs of spending that much money are huge.
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Of course, on 9-11, 3300 Americans died, eight years ago- thats basically why we're in Afghanistan, right? Lets just point out that Thirty times that many die here, each year needlessly, because they can't afford health care.
Look at it this way. One trillion dollars when divided by the number of people in this country (320,000,000) over ten years, comes to $320 per American for each of those ten years (even though as we have been told, "for bookkeeping purposes" we wont see any of it until well after the 2012 Presidential election, during which time at least 404,000 Americans will die from preventable causes because they lack access to health care.)
The false choice of unaffordable underinsurance means that high deductible insurance fails people when they need it. For example, it might get them in the hospital door, or into a doctor's office, but at what cost? Their homes, their future, their jobs? Our society pays a huge cost by avoiding its responsibility.
Where does the Democrats health insurance reform fail us? It doesn't protect people from bankruptcy or make basic healthcare affordable for everyone. It puts the interests of huge corporate entities like insurance companies, drug corporations and hospital chains ahead of those of the people. It ignores the bare minimum standards of fairness and equity that all other developed nations, except Mexico and Turkey consider to be essential. The subsidies for the poorest are important, but they can't be allowed to trap them in plans that then are allowed to spiral out of control. This kind of gotcha is why the other nations long ago changed. They didn't try to cover up the problem. They admitted that it made the insurance model impossible without major givernment involvement, did that, removing income as the determinant of access. We, we can't seem to do that. We are intentionally blind.
That is a symptom of mental illness.
Lets face it. We're a danger to ourselves and others without responsible adults at the weel. We need an intervention. Can't at least some Dems see that?
Just ask them: Other developed nations TAKE IT ON THEMSELVES TO INSURE THAT CITIZENS DON'T FALL THROUGH THE CRACKS OR GET TRAPPED BY DEBT WHEN THEY GET SICK. THEIR PEOPLE SIMPLY NEVER SEE THE HUGE BILLS THEY SEE HERE.
THOSE KINDS OF ORDEALS ARE A UNIQUELY AMERICAN SADISM.
For example, it would be unheard of to charge older people 500% more for healthcare.
People elsewhere (except in the Third World, I'm guessing) don't have to pay more, the older they get.
Do we ask parents to pay more taxes because they have children in school?
We don't yet, but its coming.
No, the money is taken out of taxes so that it doesn't become something that many people can't pay. Here, the money is charged them SO THEY CAN'T PAY IT. So they fail. In fact, that's part of the government's business model. Its obvious. They are creating an impossible situation that they know poor desperate people will fail at.
BECAUSE THEY DON'T HAVE ANY CHOICE.
The combination of rising premiums, rising costs that aren't covered, and falling or stagnant incomes for many workers due to exponential change in the workplace will leave this country in a disaster of its own making that will physically and emotionally damage millions of good Americans.
IF THE PRICE OF PASSING A BILL IS A BAD BILL, ITS BETTER TO THROW IT OUT AND START OVER.
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REAL COST CONTROL AND AFFORDABLE HEALTHCARE VIA SINGLE PAYER - OR - MAX AND OBAMA'S FAKE REFORM WITH A TICKING TIME BOMB INSIDE - IS CRUCIAL BECAUSE RESPONSIBLE ADULT HUMAN BEINGS AND ESPECIALLY GOVERNMENTS DON'T BETRAY THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN FORCED TO PUT THEIR TRUST IN THEM BY GOD.
WOULD YOU STEAL FROM A CHILD?
THE DISTORTED PERSONALITY THAT CLAIMS FAKE REFORM IS AFFORDABLE DENIES FACTS THAT THEY CANNOT ADMIT WITHOUT ALSO ADMITTING A NATIONAL DISGRACE - THAT SAME DENIAL THEN COMMITS THE GOVERNMENT TO CRIMINALIZING PEOPLE WHO CANNOT MAKE THE IMPOSSIBLE HAPPEN.
THEY CAN'T OR WON'T ADMIT THEY HAVE FAILED A NATION, REPEATEDLY, AND AS OFTEN OCCURS, THE WORST AND DEAREST PRICE OF THIS NADIR OF GROUPTHINK'S NARCISSISTIC REFUSAL TO OBJECTIVELY EVALUATE FACTS UNFAVORABLE TO ITS OWN VERSION OF THINGS IS DENIAL FORCED ON INNOCENT OTHERS.
THEY REFUSE TO TERMINATE THE CONTRACT KILLING. INNOCENT AMERICA'S PRICE IS A DEATH MARCH, FIGURATIVELY, AND LITERALLY.
IN A SHRINKING, POST-INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY WHERE UNSKILLED LABOR AND EVEN SKILLED TRADES BECOME INCREASINGLY DEVALUED PRECIOUS FEW HAVE THE EDUCATION OR ENERGY LEVEL TO REMAIN EMPLOYED AT A LIVING WAGE, ITS SUPPLY AND DEMAND DRIVING WAGES DOWN, AND VERY FEW CAN BEAT THE ODDS. THE LAW OF AVERAGES SAYS THAT.
REALITY IS THAT MANY MORE THAN THEY ARE ADMITTING - THE MAJORITY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE EVENTUALLY WONT BE ABLE TO PAY FOR THEIR PRE-DOOMED PLANS BECAUSE THEY WONT HAVE THE MONEY.
Other nations don't intentionally build these traps into government programs. Other nations consider it sound public policy to prevent health-care driven bankruptcies, not encourage them.
Citizens here who have minor medical issues come up routinely lose their jobs because employers then become terrified of price increases. Many employers have stopped hiring people over 40!
Thats why they consider us barbarians. Thats what citizens of every other developed nation consider essential. THEY don't fail the people who have come through for them. They don't let people fall through the cracks big enough to drive a truck through.
They aren't sadistic.
Thats why this administration, and batch of politicians can't be trusted to do health reform, they do not get it, at all, clearly, many have nothing but contempt for the people of this country and so, in the tradition of the greedy everywhere THEY WANT TO MAKE THE CURE ALMOST AS BAD AS THE PROBLEM OR EVEN WORSE.
In most European countries, costs are taken out of taxes, and they do not go up as people naturally age. The fact that they are a legal resident and a human being, not the minutiae of whether they are paid up or in arrears determines whether they get care.
Health issues are dealt with sensibly, and business hires people on the basis of skill and suitability, and per employee taxes are not tied to health benefit use.
Taxes, where they exist, are modest, for example, Holland, which has a private insurance system includes everybody and charges everybody $160 a month.
People don't have to pay extra to allow them to go to the doctor or buy drugs they need.
People don't end up frequently dying of preventable causes, even though they paid, often far more than they could afford, for "insurance".
There needs to be an honest administration working on real reform.
This administration poisoned the deck at the very beginning. They made a secret deal at the beginning to keep real cost control solutions and single payer health care off the table, and then pretended to have a phony staged debate. They wasted our time with a fake dog and pony show.
One could make a good argument that this whole process has been fraudulently conducted in very bad faith.
Let me ask you a question, does one of these numbers seem really outrageously high and the other outrageously low?
Regardless of the justice or use of having troops in Afghanistan (personally, I have mixed feelings, there aren't simple answers.) I don't think we should be spending anything near a million dollar a soldier. No way. No f***** way.
Where the hell is that money going?
Now, I don't think that the approach we're following on healthcare is the right one, if it was, a trillion dollars would go much farther. But, we committed not to do any of a dozen different things that could save money many months ago, in a back room deal that didn't get covered in the news until it was revealed by accident. Regardless of how its spent, there's a lot of people who expect help who wont get it. That money spread so thin is not going to go far towards affordability considering the need and ever-inflating cost. Maybe it isn't meant to, maybe its just a symbol of some kind.
A symbol of ten years during which prices will continue to skyrocket, for all intents and purposes.
But suppose it was enough. If it was, considering the amount of money we spend on each soldier in Afghanistan, the one million dollar cost of each troop would be enough to give that $312 subsidy towards health care affordability to 3125 more people.
Or, think of what it could do for education. The jobs of the 21st century increasingly depend on cutting edge skillsets, and to be able to absorb them, people need education.
Without the context needed to learn the skills needed in 21st century workplaces, all the good will and boundless energy in the world won't get people jobs. If the global economy recovers, and people start buying again, it doesn't take a genius to see that jobs will be created, but they wont be created here.
Health care and education are the substance that the politicians should be concentrating on, to "insure" that we don't become an economic has been, while the rest of the world leaves us in the dust, instead of hijacking our future to line the pockets of well connected contractors, and offering up feel good phrases and cargo cult economics instead of needs.
Can I say it, Our Cold War military committments are a luxury we can't afford. Our backroom deals to ignore cost control in favor of the insurance-centric solution that leaves people dying is a luxury we didn't vote for and can't afford.
We can't afford doesn't mean "we're going to ignore what we can't afford and do the wrong thing anyway". No means no, we can't afford it. No, we have only one choice and thats to ditch the experiment, ditch the unproven experimental procedure. Lets not cover a lie. We only have one choice thats within our means and thats to ditch the whole insurance-centric approach and switch to the only path that we know can stop those 101,000 deaths, single payer.
Otherwise, our patrician leaders have volunteered to generously donate our future to their longtime associates, the murderers, without our permission.
If and only if we stop the train and get off, only if we switch to sanity, we avoid the Titanic deck chair effect. Insurance reform/public option is not in any way reform, its the antithesis of it. It is emphatically a not very well concealed trick. Its anti-reform.
Obama's lock-in gets us guaranteed failure. The price of saving face is a nations future and millions of needlessly lost lives (perhaps they are anticipating reduced costs in Social Security?) Failure seems not to bother them, they revel in it. They smile and I suppose they see humor in a system that offers the lesser of two evils and then prvents any accountability.
Call them on the lies, tell the truth, let the chips fall where they will, and we see the good people from the bad, see who cares about this country's future and after a moments humiliation for some, we will have made an important decision that cannot be a mistake. We will have taken the big step and we will soon get affordability for all.
We don't have any other choice.
We would basically continue to pay the health care providers what we do now, but through taxes instead of premiums. We would avoid the age tax, avoid the parent tax (obviously, a back door to eliminating public education) and shift a huge amount of the money we spend on premiums and CEOS and insulating the goverment from caring or accountability - to healthcare.
YES WE CAN make healthcare affordable for everybody for less than what we are spending now. YES WE CAN if we say NO to the insurance industry black hole.
If we try to do it the insurance way, the way they are leading us by the nose towards, we will be committing national suicide. Its much more than simply paying more and more for less and less, and the chance for affordable health care in our lifetimes, Its national suicide.
What really is happening is that for most of us, for the vast majority of Americans, the "choice" offered by an exchange will be an empty one because already, but doubly so by 2013, the costs are becoming impossible. What good is a choice between insurance options, you can choose "affordable" with its implicit guarantee of larger uncovered costs, (the only option that will be available to those receiving subsidies, no doubt) but, the low actuarial value plans have a huge liability in that their substantial uncovered costs often make them far more expensive than the expensive plans if you get sick.
In order to preserve the hierarchy of plans, though, and preserve the contract that the Obama administration committed all Americans to, before the staged debate began, between the insurance industry and the government legislators, just like they are with the state high risk pools, its absolutely non-negotiable that any options not offer more than private insurers for the money. Therefore, any public plan prices will be forced to be comparable to those of private industry for similar kinds of patients.
That guarantees one thing, though, one very important thing. The insurers know, but they worry, no matter how much Obama reassures them, they that it that the years spent waiting for that $320 a year, will be spent waiting for something that does not, that can not work.
in what we are waiting for, It will be a learning experience but not by making healthcare affordable, it will be by its delaying real health care reform and by its betraying the trust placed in the soon to be hugely unpopular Democratic party by Americans. We are not being given any choice that works. Thanks to healthcare costs, people can't buy anything else, they can't save, businesses can't employ, and an entire nation is wasting years and lives in survival behavior. You would almost think that we were in the midst of our own Hundred Years War.
But, do most people realize that this is completely unnecessary? Often, NO. Not only are Americans increasingly financially constrained, also thanks to decades of cutbacks on education, we are unaware of the huge differences in net worth that the cost differential represents. That 30-50% is a whole nation's future growth. That we need healthcare is non-negotiable. What is negotiable is whether we have real healthcare, that works, which at this point, need to happen via single payer. The government wants to preserve some insulation from responsibility, even as we already spend 60% of each healthcare dollar, but its too late to make healthcare affordable without rolling back prices to 20th century levels. In 2005 3/5 of American wageearners couldn't afford unsubsidized healthcare of arguably already marginal quality, its far worse now, and it will be much worse than this in 2013. They are dreaming. Single payer is one of two options, its the most moderate solution of the two. Single payer doesn't nationalize hospitals, it just gets rid of the huge and expensive insurance company barrier to care. By doing that, we earn a lot. The cost for us as a nation suddenly, poof, becomes affordable. If we wait five more years, we will be in much more of a mess than we are today, leaving fully nationalized healthcare as our only option. Theoretically, it could be still cheaper, but there's a gotcha. Remember the fall of the Soviet Union and the HUGE amounts of money pocketed by crooks when public ultilities were privatized. Well, the same thing would happen in reverse, with the government paying wildly inflated prices (because it would have no choice) because nationalization would require that the government buy out investors. In fact, its pretty clear that many of the same folk who bring you the spreadsheet murders EXPECT THIS TO EVENTUALLY HAPPEN and they have been preparing for that eventual possibility/probability by buying up provider networks to fix prices. A good example of how the price fixing has doomed affordability is there for everyone to see- in Massachusetts.
So, there you have it. We really don't have any "choice" at all now, if we want affordable quality. WHAT COULD BE MORE IMPORTANT THAT THAT?
Is it obvious yet? If we fall for their their fake substitute for real public-first healthcare, we will all be doomed to both pay too much for healthcare and to get far too little.
The generous Democrats have committed a nation to pay the insurance industry. woefully financially unsophisticated nation.