Politics
What’s stopping them?
Working with their minions in the Republican Congress, the healthcare, insurance and pharmaceutical lobbies killed “Hillary-care” in the early 1990s. They called her program, which would have insured every American, “socialistic.”
“Let the private sector deal with this,” said the Republicans. “We don’t need another government program.”
That was 12 years ago or so. In the interim, not only has the private sector not resolved the healthcare crisis, things have gotten steadily worse.
Most tellingly of all, nobody has a solution in the works. It isn’t even being discussed in a serious way by the people who run the country.
Someone is bankrupted by healthcare costs every day. It happened last month to someone I know.
Really. What is stopping the healthcare or the insurance industries from solving this problem?
The answer is obvious. Those industries are not having a problem. They are making money hand over fist.
Topics: Politics
The private sector won’t even consider pitching-in to help with the health care crisis until it’s guaranteed huge profits, such as the pharmaceutical industry is now receiving with the Medicare prescription drug plan. The privates know that they can’t compete on a level playing field with the likes of Medicare and the Veterans Administration. They also knows that the single payer systems (as in Canada and Western Europe) are much cheaper and cover much more (long term rehabilitation, for example)than corporate medicine does. Why isn’t our president interested in taking the cheapest and most efficient route? Because he’s not concerned only with making sure that his immoral and wasteful market ideology prevails, to hell with the public. What’s the answer? Replace Capitalism and its market system with Participatory Economics (Parecon) authored by Michael Albert (see Znet), thereby dumping the profit motive and moving towards a classless society. It’s doable!
[...] companies and big pharma — and we need to do it quickly. We can’t wait for the supposed private sector solution that everyone knows is just a myth, and we can’t keep putting bandaids on the current, [...]