On health care and scare tactics

My greatest source of amusement the past few weeks has been watching a lot of Americans act like gullible idiots on the health care issue. What is even more amusing is that progressives like Representative Denis Kucinich and the usual gaggle of right-wing nut bars both oppose the Obama health care plan. Of course they do not oppose it for the same reason.

A straight forward and functional solution to the problem of health care coverage in the U.S. would be to adopt a single payer insurance system similar to the one in Canada, either at the national or state level. This is what Kucinich supports. What the profiteers and right-wing extremists want is a totally privatized health care system. What Obama has foolishly offered up is a dysfunctional combination of both, and both the progressives on the left and the regressives on the right are up in arms.

For the progressives the battle is truly about health care. They want a system that effectively delivers universal health care to everyone, something that is currently lacking in the U.S. where millions of people have no health coverage.

What the regressives really want has nothing to do at all with health care. For some it is about protecting profits in a system that is one of the most expensive in the world. The U.S. spends about $6,000 per person per year. Canada, on the other hand, spends about half that much, and Japan, Germany, Denmark and many others with better health coverage than the U.S. even less. Apparently there is a bonanza in the American system for the insurance companies and others. A bonanza funded by taking money out of actually delivering health care and redirecting it to returns on investment.

For the really looney ones it is about government control. These are the ones wound up and turned loose by the likes of Fox News and the talk radio jocks that cater to the simple minded. Screaming and hollering, toting signs and some toting guns, they try to shut down rational discourse at public meetings on health care being held around the country. They are witless tools of those who profit from the current system, and their ignorance is manifest in their claims.

The idea that Obama's health care plan will kill grandma was outrageously hilarious, and that anyone would believe it speaks directly to how little they really know about what they are talking about. Then, there are the fears exhibited about socialism and government control. Those make one wonder about how much serious thought these people give to anything, particularly when they are arguing this in defence of their government operated Medicare.

One might point out to these fools that public highways, police departments, fire departments, the military and much more are all provided by government. The case can be made that health care is every bit as important to the maintenance of society as these other institutions and logically should be organized in the same manner. If those opposed to government control follow their anti-government logic to its conclusion they would argue that all of these institutions would be sold off to private investors and there would be no more public services.

Do they really think that hiring their own police or fire department or turning all roads into toll roads is a good idea? If not, why do they think that spending a big chunk of their health care money on corporate profits is such a good deal when in a single payer, publicly controlled system much more of it would go directly to either health care or lower costs to the individual? Not to mention that with a single payer system everyone would have reasonable access to care.

Perhaps the title of an article in a recent issue of The Washington Post sums up best what is happening in the health care debate in the U.S.: In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition [2].

Jerry West is the publisher, editor and janitor for The Record [3], an independent, progressive regional publication for Nootka Sound and Canada's West Coast.

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