The act of digging her grave made it real for me. I was going to kill her. Until then, it'd just been an idea. She had to die, but it hadn't really set in that I was going to have to kill her. Digging her grave settled that issue. I was going to kill her.
If you are feeling a mounting horror, then you feel as I do. But please, have the fortitude to read on...
I have quite a first hand knowledge about certain kinds of death. I grew up in a nursing home my first 9 years of life and I saw death come in many forms.
It snuck up quietly on some and took them in their sleep. Others it pounced upon suddenly and they fell or their heads dropped. One died peacefully, holding my hand and smiling.
But, for some, death seemed hellbent on making them suffer. It did everything to make their last days on this earth a living hell. And it wasn't like they had been bad people, no. They'd lived good lives and were good people in fact, not just in the eyes of a child who had grown to know them.
Everything was done to try to make those days as comfortable and painless as possible for them, but the time came when they had to be sent to the hospital from which they never returned.
So I've known death. Death's not what I'm horrified of. Digging this grave simply allowed the reality of what comes next to sink in. I'm sad because it's time for her to die.
Our vet diagnosed her with brain cancer some months ago. Now she's lost much of her motor skills. It's painful to watch, and she's starting to suffer. She's still a beautiful dog.
But it's time.
This has to be done. It's the decent thing to do, to show mercy and compassion to animals. The thing is, it's more decency than we show our fellow man. If we suffer mentally and physically near our time of death, our medical industry refuses show us that same decency, that same mercy, that same compassion. And the reason for that is what has me horrified.
It's because they are in it for the money.
There's more money to be gouged from the patient the longer they are made to cling to a hopeless, terminal condition. More money to suck out of their families, their heirs, their loved ones.
Because that's what they do. They suck us dry. Every possible chance they get, they stick it to us.
American hospitals are fleecing patients out of billions of dollars annually, and experts say that while some of the overcharges are honest errors, many are deliberate.
And how much is some? According to Nora Johnson, a trained medical billing advocate:
More than 90 percent of the hospital bills I've audited have gross overcharges,
Gross? Or indecent?
This is an industry with no compassion, no mercy and no decency. Not even the common decency you'd show a dog.
"Hospitals are huge moneymakers," she explains. "Their executives enjoy big bonuses."
As a result, "Hospitals have become highly innovative when it comes to billing, and ordinary citizens have no idea they're being ripped off,"
It's no secret to anybody that this is going on. Just browse the web and you'll find plenty of people with stories like this:
Mt pharmacist ( and friend ) and his wife just had a baby and he was telling me what a rip off the hospital was. hey charged $7.50 for one tylenol tablet. They charged $5000 for bathing his new baby a few times. They charged $120 for an inhaler that he sells in his pharmacy for $20 and makes a big profit on. It's getting out of hand.
or this:
my wife takes a medication I inject into her. It has been on the market since 1956 so passed generic long ago. She used to get it for $25 a vial ( tiny vial ), now it is $900 a vial. Justify that with anything but pure unadulterated greed.
Or this:
we just received my wife’s first hospital bill — $1,510 for her epidural!
Hell, even the medical industry apologists don't deny the ripoff:
"Medical procedures are often marked up 2,600 percent.
So is our medical industry's primary purpose to provide healthcare or to make a fast buck no matter what the human suffering? Because if they are truly committed to healthcare then we wouldn't be hearing about bullshit like this:
The folks who invented the credit score for lenders are hard at work developing a similar tool for hospitals and other health care providers.
The project, dubbed "MedFICO" in some early press reports, will aid hospitals in assessing a patient’s ability to pay their medical bills. But privacy advocates are worried that the notorious errors that have caused frequent criticism of the credit system will also cause trouble with any attempt to create a health-related risk score. They also fear that a low score might impact the quality of the health care that patients receive.
Might impact the quality of health care that patients receive? Ya think?
So does Hunger In America:
As shown in Table 8.2.1N, the findings discussed above indicate that nearly 1 million adult clients of the A2H system had been refused medical care in the previous year, due to not being able to pay or care or because they lacked insurance.
And I haven't even touched upon the well documented disgrace that is the insurance industry. By far, the greatest evil of all is committed by them.
There's only one truth to be found in all of this: privatized medicine is a moral disaster and the source of great suffering to the American people.
We treat our dogs better than this.
But even that isn't what really horrifies me. What really horrifies me is that once again we've elected a Democrat to do what the people overwhelmingly want him to do - fix the healthcare crisis - and once again, nothing is being done.
Instead, we're being sold on the "Public Option" Con:
At the Health Care for America Now (HCAN) and Citizen Action Illinois sponsored rally in Chicago last weekend, single-payer advocates confronted HCAN leadership and Democratic Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky (D-Illinois) who instead of working to pass HR 676, John Conyers single-payer bill titled the United States National Health Insurance Act, are supporting the so called "public option."
The rally was a slick "Sell out single-payer and confuse em’ show" from start to finish, replete with retro 70’s song Ain’t no Stoppin’ Us Now blasting into the auditorium.
Speaker after speaker projected a wish list of health care reforms onto the nonexistent public option plan: benefits must be comprehensive, coverage must be affordable, no denial of care, and equal access to quality care. Who could disagree if a plan like that could actually be enacted? The problem is the United States will never, ever get a plan like that while the private insurance industry is still breathing. HCAN and liberal Democrats have to engage in this "magical thinking" in order to convince a skeptical public that a public option embedded in a for-profit system can work. Only a single-payer system, one that drives a stake through the heart of the insatiably greedy insurance corporations once and for all, can deliver on those promises.
The American health insurance system is based on the avoidance of the elderly and sick so insurers didn’t care much when Medicare was created: seniors have complex and costly health care needs that cut into profit margins. Let the government and taxpayers foot the bill for old people. Plus, people aren’t eligible for Medicare until they turn 65 so the vampires would have decades of opportunity to bleed Americans into medical bankruptcy. A similar dynamic was at work with Medicaid: poor people tend to have chronic health problems and that cuts into profit margins. Let the government and the taxpayers take care of them, but the minute they are healthy enough to work, kick ‘em out of the program and into the clutches of the vampires or the ranks of the uninsured. Whose left? Everybody in between. That’s what is driving the insurance industry and Karen Ignagni, the Chief Evil Officer (CEO) of America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), into a frenzy. They fear a public plan will snatch away "their" market: the millions of people who don’t fall into the above categories of old and poor, especially the young and the healthy. It’s the profits, stupid!
Or as the Physicians for a National Health Program explain:
A public plan option doesn’t lead toward single-payer, but toward the segregation of patients, with profitable ones in private plans and unprofitable ones in the public one."
I'm horrified - and you should be too - because, as David Sirota has pointed out:
In 2003, Obama said he supports a single-payer health care system, and that the only reason we "may not get there immiediately" is "because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House" - which, of course, we have:
"I happen to be a proponent of a single payer universal health care program...I see no reason why the United States of America, the wealthiest country in the history of the world, spending 14 percent of its Gross National Product on health care cannot provide basic health insurance to everybody. And that's what Jim is talking about when he says everybody in, nobody out. A single payer health care plan, a universal health care plan. And that's what I'd like to see. But as all of you know, we may not get there immediately. Because first we have to take back the White House, we have to take back the Senate, and we have to take back the House." - Barack Obama, 2003
In 2006, I spent a day with Obama in the U.S. Senate, and he said he supports a "debate" on single-payer, but that he also bad started to have his doubts, now that he was in the Senate:
I asked him to give me some specific examples of what he meant. Is a proposal to convert America's healthcare system to one in which the government is the single payer for all services revolutionary or reformist? "Anything that Canada does can't be entirely revolutionary-it's Canada," Obama joked. "When I drive through Toronto, it doesn't look like a bunch of Maoists." Even so, Obama said that although he "would not shy away from a debate about single-payer," right now he is "not convinced that it is the best way to achieve universal healthcare."
By last week, it became clear that Obama and his allies in Congress will use their legislative leverage to prevent even a debate about single payer. Here's the Associated Press:
Baucus and many others, including President Barack Obama, say single-payer is not practical or politically feasible.
"Everything is on the table with the single exception of single-payer," Baucus said.
So yeah, I'm horrified, but not because I'm going to have to put down my dog, which has me distressed enough as it is, but by the impending death of single-payer healthcare.
I'm horrified that I can now look forward to less compassion, less decency than we show our own pets. I'm horrified because Obama's turnaround is digging our graves.
Isn't it time the medical insurance industry died so we can all be put out of our misery?
Or is it time that we realized that Democracy is Dead and the people with the money control our nation, not We The People? In which case, how many people are going to have to die before we decide to take back our country, by force if need be?
Because either they dig our graves or we dig theirs.
