Affordable health care? Yea, right
I haven't seen "Sicko" yet but it seems to me that the term "affordable healthcare" is an Oxymoron, at least in America. When you consider all of the billion dollar industries that thrive on the amount of money we pay for health care in America, you've got to wonder how it could ever be affordable. Between the doctors, the hospitals, the pharmaceutical industry, and the insurance companies, I don't see how the numbers could ever pan out for all Americans to have affordable health care. The reason why other countries can do it and we can't is because we pay out too much money to sustain the largest military in the world! Our military costs us more than all of the other combined militaries in the world cost their respective countries.
I'm not making a judgement call about what is more important between health care and the military, I'm just saying that other countries that have affordable or free health care do not have the expenses that we Americans do. Besides the military, what does illegal immigration cost us each year? What about the perks and retirement benefits of hundreds of politicians and ex politicians? What about the no bid multi billion dollar contracts awarded to Halliburton and other corporations that own....I mean, have close ties to politicians? What about the costs of pork barrel spending, the pet projects that congress is so fond of? What about the interest we pay on the largest debt in the world?
If we ever want to have affordable, or free health care, which isn't really free but paid for with taxes, then we first have to curb our appetites in other areas. Here's a few good starters.....Stop the war in Iraq, give the president a line item veto, tax churches, cut back Bushes tax cuts to the rich, balance the budget for a change and stop borrowing trillions of dollars, regulate the pharmaceutical and insurance industries better, make it less lucrative for corporations to outsource American jobs, and most important, implement some real -sink your teeth into- type of campaign finance reform. Then we could cut taxes enough so that Americans could afford health insurance, or keep taxes where they are at and have a socialized free health care system.
Comments
Whats really funny is how things that the insurance companies pay for cost more and more each year, but the things that we would pay for go down. Have you noticed that things like getting the eye laser correction, and beast jobs, nose jobs, cost less then they did 10 years ago. When the insurance companies pay we don't care what it cost, because its not us paying the huge costs, so the Doctors and Hospitals charge more. But they know that we will look for the best job at the best price, so therefor the cost of things we pay out of pocket go down, or they just don't go up
Posted by: Don Runkle | July 13, 2007 02:43 PM