It doesn’t take a genius to understand the premise of the new health care law, which is that all Americans should buy health insurance so that the healthy can help subsidize the sick.
I don’t hear anyone whining about the fact that we are all required to buy car insurance, even though many of us, like me, hardly ever have cause to use it.
Health insurance could and should operate under the same principle. If everyone pays their share, the costs will also be shared.
And the so-called individual health insurance mandate will most likely be much less expensive for society in the long run, since it will result in increased preventive care and far fewer expensive emergency room visits.
Of course a universal single-payer system—Medicare for all—would be much better than the “free-market” insurance system that is under discussion today. But at least having everyone insured, with subsidies to help those who can’t afford to pay, is a good step in the right direction.
The new law also prevents insurance companies from denying people health care because they’re sick, a truly barbaric Americanism, and allows families to continue to cover their children’s insurance up to age 26. Who could argue with that?
The truth is that our nation could easily afford to cover all its citizens’ health care, and then some, if we took several crucial steps:
- Properly tax the rich: close tax loopholes, tax financial transactions, make a genuine commitment to closing the abyss between the 10% at the top and everyone else.
- Shut down the war machine; spend money on butter, not guns—or better yet, on organic vegetables that will keep people healthy. It’s insane to put so many trillions into weapons aimed at blowing people up, and then throw a hissy fit about government spending on keeping people healthy.
- Raise the minimum wage substantially, so that people can afford to eat healthy food, live a healthy lifestyle, and buy own their health insurance policies.
We live in a nation besieged with ill health. From cancer to diabetes to heart disease and asthma, not to mention depression, ADHD and autism, we are a country of chronically ill people. I blame much of this on the toxic food that has been sold to us over the past 60 years, since the end of World War II, by the industrial agriculture and food packaging giants, which have irresponsibly poisoned our waters, air, soil—and our bodies.
The powers that be want us to believe that the solutions are very, very complicated. So much so that we should just leave it to the experts—go back home and eat some more antibiotic-laced hamburgers, why don’t you, and watch some more mind-numbing reality TV.
Actually, it’s just the opposite. It is not complicated at all, it’s very simple.
We the people pay our taxes so that our government will work for us. We have a right to healthy food, water and air. We have a right to health care. We have a right to expect that our elected representatives, as well as our Supreme Court Justices, will act in our best interests.
Since the Citizens United decision, it has become starkly apparent that corporations, not people, get preference when it comes to rights. Money talks: they have the billions to buy the politicians and the media, and the rest of us be damned.
Well, enough is enough. This is exactly where the Occupy movement has to step in and show that Americans have not become the catatonic stooges that the media giants aimed to produce.
We know what’s going on.
We have been so, so patient. So law-abiding. So earnestly hopeful, with each election, that things would get better.
Things have only gotten worse, and there is no end in sight.
President Obama has done far better than a President McCain would have done, but he is no knight in shining armor.
No one politician can do this on his or her own.
It’s going to take the collective will of a great coalition of ordinary folks to get this nation to focus on what’s really important in this new century.
And let me tell you, it does not have to do with health insurance.
It has to do with climate.
Tonight in New England a bitter wind is blowing, and the temperature is expected to drop to the single digits, with a wind chill below zero Farenheit. After a week of balmy summery temperatures in the 80s, the blooming trees and flowers are going to get a harsh night of frost.
This is apparently the new normal as regards our climate. Even if we were to immediately do everything possible to slow down carbon emissions, a ship the size of our planet would take several of our little lifetimes to rectify itself.
So we need to get used to it. And if we don’t want it to get worse—that is, absolutely uninhabitable for most current life forms—we need to roll up our sleeves and put all our intelligence to work at creating new, sustainable forms of agriculture, industry and lifestyle.
It can be done.
But not while we fritter away our precious time in begging the entrenched powers to give us some crumbs.
No, we need to unseat those powers and dramatically reorganize our social priorities.
It can be done.
May Day is coming. It must be a day of reckoning, the gateway to a hot summer of the hard work needed to provoke serious, transformative change.
Transition Times 