AMeRiCaN GuLaG

I heard this on the radio once. Japanese retro-pop from the late 1990’s. Spritely and amusing! (even though I don’t understand Japanese.)

Whether its the nightly news, twitter, blogs, friends, hear-say, talk radio, American has plugged itself into the HCR (Healthcare Reform) debate/debacle and soon to be signed Healthcare Reform Bill.

Politically charged, carefully, crafted rhetoric has been launched from both political parties….

Michael offers, I think, a broad brush criticism of the game of politics and political parties. 

The problem as I see it is the current politics of fear and the exploitation of the great ignorance of the American public through propaganda. The welfare of corporations is the concern of government now, not the welfare of citizens or the rights of people. The health care reform bill is essentially a big feed of money to insurance companies, with a few incidental benefits to American citizens. No politician can afford to alienate the interests of business. Our elected officials represent their campaign funders.

Ask not what health care reform can do for you, ask rather, what can health care reform do for big business interests. 

There should be no doubt that the Tea Party is a tool of business interests; look at their funding. This is not a grass roots organization, but a bunch of angry, frightened people ripe for manipulation.

American cultural isolation and ignorance of other countries makes the current bill the best we could do right now. 

Do American citizens have a right to health care? Is it in the State’s interest to have healthy citizens? I hear people yapping about “freedom”. You do not exercise any meaningful degree of freedom in your use of health insurance. You take whatever your employer offers you at whatever price it’s offered, or you buy your own or you go without. That’s the “freedom” we have. Examine the practice of how health care is administered in this country and you can see how defective, exploitive, and anti-health it is. Combine that with the grossly unhealthy sedentary lives we lead, together with the toxic, over-processed diet that is promoted to us (even by government agencies), and you see that as a country we are sick, and that we fail to take care of our health.

Actual comparisons of most health quality indicators comparing America with other countries should be persuasive, such as life expectancy or infant mortality. We spend more than any other country on health care, but are close to the bottom among prosperous industrialized nations on most health quality indicators.