So, if you're me and you care about health care, and optional medicine that your doctor says is necessary to avoid permanent mild to moderate shock -- but your health care insurance company says that you have to take the nonprescription stuff that is still sending you into shock -- you got a beef.
But what have you done to push health care? By the numbers, probably not much. In all reality, people do very little to get bills passed. I can cite you over a hundred bills (including many on smoking and seatbelts) that no citizen ever really wanted passed. Insurance companies made the laws, and they got them passed. The nannyization of our society, as the conservatives like to so quaintly put it, comes from CORPORATIONS.
Health care is becoming a big beef, and deservedly so. But most people don't realize just yet how big of a beef it is -- and so we don't see the activism you would expect. No marching in the streets (that got covered, at least). No coverage of the poor folks holding garage sales because their "best of the bunch" insurance still wouldn't cover their bills. If the TeeVee ain't screamin' about something, most people wouldn't know shit about it. I regularly mention the food crisis -- and people, even educated professors, look at me like I should need to take a class to learn about my world.
Anyway, that's beyond and beside the point.
The point is, it isn't us pushing health care. It's unions, for certain, but who else is there? Well, we got the big four automakers -- and basically anyone else who needs to compete on a global basis. Everyone else gets the group discount on health care, except for Americans. And ... the people this hurts the most? Small businessmen. It's hard to get employees when you pay oodles of money for health care -- and when you're small time, those employees are your business.
Having single payer health care, should we ever see it, would do a lot to create social mobility. Because we just gotta get wall street out of our health care system. Too much of our GDP is spent on health care, and that's because it is PROFITABLE, not because we need it, always. Who really needs cosmetic surgery? (err, the guy with the cleft lip, yes, him.)
End of rant, and thank you for having the patience to read it.
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