Consumer confidence seems on the rise. Foreclosures hit an all time high this month. The US government now owns 60% of General Motors. My neighbor, Dustin, now calls the company Government Motors, and not in a nice way. What to make of it all?
No one knows what lies ahead. I now realize health is the most important part of every day. When you do not have it, life becomes a walk through mounds of fire ants. Being without health insurance could change that walk into a crawl through those same carnivores. Living here in the reddest California county I see the vast majority of people oppose a universal single-payer system. A lot of people here, although not big on Darwin's theory of evolution, ironically subscribe to the survival of the fittest thinking, which means the fittest (those with the most means) get cool benefits, and those not quite fit enough (fill in your own means quotient) get squat.
Arguments, which show our current health care market forces those with the means to pay substantially more in premiums to cover those who have no coverage, have no sway on the rugged individualist when they are immersed in a discussion on why universal coverage would be a societal and economic tonic. Forget bringing up GDP numbers that show us idiots here in the states paying almost twice the price for less results than every other advanced industrial nation. Here in Bakersfield those types of facts are met with, "Boring!" some of the time. Or, "Socialism is evil!" some other amount of time. There are many who believe every ill visited on the US is due to illegal immigration. Schools, health care, jobs, roads, food and sex all would be perfect in that Prairie Home Companion/Lake Woebegone way if only all those illegals were washed away from our shores.
The only thing that might convince a few of these people is if they, or a significant member of their immediate families, suffer a big enough health crisis and go broke. Maybe the 30% out of pocket expense, as part of the affordable coverage, really hurts the pocketbook. Maybe this expense occurs as the result of a major hernia, which happened from the lap dance administered when the wife was out of town at the local relaxation lounge that cannot be explained. This expense causes some critical thinking to take place that the insurance you do have currently is really bogus right now when I need it most.
When I hear the conservatives rail at socialized medicine, and that medical choices will be determined by a government bureaucrat I always ask what difference does that make to anyone on a typical HMO or PPO plan today. The fact is a bureaucrat working for an insurance company makes the call on what treatment you get and what medicines you can take, or at least what the insurance company will pay a portion of as part of your coverage. And if you have too many, or too expensive, claims from an insurance company they simply cut you loose.
As the bigger companies continue to ship jobs and work to the least expensive nations of the world, and more small business start ups spring onto the US economic Monopoly board by displaced former employees of big companies, the cost these new small businesses can bear are not that much if they have any hope for survival. This simply means businesses can no longer be the place that subsidizes health care costs.
A quote from an MSNBC article "If we don't get it done this year, we're not going to get it done," Obama told supporters by phone as he flew home on Air Force One from a West Coast fundraising trip. -
This above quote is motivation for me. I hope it is motivation for you. No advanced nation on the planet allows an accident or illness to financially ruin a family. This can only happen in the USA.
On this date, June 2, 1941, Lou Gehrig " the luckiest man on the face of the earth" succumbed to
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), now called Lou Gehrig's Disease. A few short years before he was the Iron Horse who never missed a game as a perennial all-star.
Your future is a millisecond away. Can you cover the small change a significant medical problem might require?
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