There's a lot of people saying that universal single-payer healthcare for USA citizens is too expensive- that we haven't got the money for it.
They're right.
That's because the money is being spent elsewhere.
Let me give you a little example.
Waste- it's the military machine's middle name.
A trillion here, a trillion there, some lives, material thrown away because the paperwork was lost- I don't want to go into that now, because I've experienced it, and what it boils down to is that there's very lucrative military industries that give our politicians enough money to keep the said industries grinding on.
And we don't even know what we're missing in dollars, because most people don't count things like the resources used to make that hardware that should be going to industries that make things that we, the people, actually want and use.
We don't count the energy used to fuel war industries that could be used to power peaceful industries.
Forgotten is the cost of re-educating veterans who lose limbs. Forgotten is the cost of feeding homeless veterans who came back from Vietnam or Iraq, and soon Afghanistan, too damaged to hold a job. Forgotten are all the ancillary costs of the constant war that the USA has fought for the past umpteen years.
Our politicians, with a very few exceptions, are paid to continue this waste at the expense of our well-being. Health care? why bother, when the lobbyists from Lockheed pay so well?
Let me give you one small example of what we're paying for instead of single-payer health care.
SIXTY YEARS after World War Two, the USA still has troops in Germany, among other countries. MANY other countries.
For a while after WWII, we rationalized it by saying that we were 'defending Europe' from the Warsaw Pact forces, who were just waiting to invade through Germany with hundreds of thousands of tanks, etc.
When the Berlin Wall fell, that rationale went out the window. Now, I'm not sure why we're there.
In the 60's I was stationed outside Munich, in Schleissheim. The mess hall fed about 500 American troops, and believe me we ate well. The German troops that we had trained to use the radars that we gave them (Radars made by Raytheon... another IMPORTANT industry in the USA) loved to come and eat in our mess hall. They always said that their food was horrible compared to ours.
Naturally the waste was enormous. Every day a German pig farmer used to come and pick up three huge garbage cans full of food waste that became hog slops.
Our taxes go to pay for that farmer to fatten his pigs. And every dollar wasted on fattening his hogs is a dollar that cannot be spent on OUR healthcare, so-called 'socialized' healthcare that everybody in Germany, including that hog farmer, gets.
Now this is only a very small example of where YOUR money is going.
And this is why I am totally against any form of agressive war, and why I believe that we desperately need a viable, worldwide peace movement. How to accomplish this, I don't know. I feel that we Americans are still too comfortable to get off our butts and demand that our representatives do something for the people for a change, instead of for their cronies in the defense industries.
Thank you for reading my little rant on a Sunday. I've written about this before, and the diary has disappeared under the weight of important diaries, such as the inevitable Palin diaries, or the ones about Michael Jackson, or the other oh-so-important topics that we as a nation and as a blog think are important. I don't even lament the loss of my TU status; I don't really have much time to comment.