Why We Can’t Get Single Payer Health Care by Ed Ciaccio

Sent to DS by the author, thanks, Ed.

by Ed Ciaccio
Dandelion Salad
June 7, 2009

It doesn’t matter to “our” supposed representatives in D.C. that a majority of Americans prefer a single payer, all-inclusive health care system, especially once they understand how it works and how it would be better (truly universal, more efficient and more effective) than our current dysfunctional profit care system.

It doesn’t matter that more than 18,000 Americans die each year (that’s SIX 9/11 casualty counts!) due to their lack of health care.

It doesn’t matter that EVERY OTHER Western democracy has its own form of a single payer health care system and that the overwhelming majority of the people in each of those countries, from Taiwan to Canada to Denmark to France to Germany, would NOT change their current systems back to a profit care system such as ours.

Why?

The Corporate Tools (a.k.a. most of Congress & the President) will not allow single payer as an option to profit care because their preciou$ campaign coffer$ will suffer.  [Go to http://www.opensecrets.org/index.php to find out how much each industry gave to each member of Congress as well as to each presidential candidate.]

The FCM (Fawning Corporate Media) will not allow an explanation nor even a discussion of single payer health care because their advertising $$ from profit care – Big Insurance and Big Pharma – will suffer.

We don’t have a democracy; we have an auction.

Anyone who isn’t aware of this inconvenient truth has been living in fantasy land.

Anyone not outraged by this inconvenient truth is not paying attention.

Anyone who will still vote for the Corporate Tools in the next election automatically forfeits the right to complain about our lousy and expensive profit care system, not to mention our unending-wars-for-corporate-profit system and our redistributing-the wealth-from-Main-Street-to-Wall-Street-banksters-system as well.

Killing and dying in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan ($97 billion total approved by both parties for next year), and maintaining more than 800 U.S. military bases in countries around the planet where we are mostly NOT wanted (costing over $100 billion per year) are not the choices we, the people, have made.  This is corporate militarism (empire) for corporate profit, exactly what President Eisenhower warned us about in his January, 1961 farewell speech. But he edited it so he didn’t refer to the “Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex” as he originally intended.

Bailing out Wall Street banks and investment firms with hundreds of billions of OUR tax dollars while tens of millions of homes are still being foreclosed, the national unemployment rate rises above 16% (see http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/69529.html and http://www.dollarsandsense.org/blog/2009/05/black-male-unemployment-jumps-to-172.html), manufacturing and service sector jobs are still being outsourced overseas, and offshore tax havens for corporations and the wealthy are still allowed is NOT the economic plan we, the people, need nor want.

To paraphrase and update Gore Vidal: the United States really has only one major political party, the Corporate Party, which has two militarist wings, the Republican and the Democratic.  All other illusions are merely well-crafted distractions from what is really “behind the curtain”.

Until an overwhelming majority of us recognize this reality and demand that it change, even if it means getting out in the streets of every town and city, including in front of the homes and offices of these nearly 537 Corporate Tools (including Obama & Biden), shouting and banging pots and pans and publicly embarrassing them as pro-democracy protestors did in South America, nothing will improve, much less really “be the change we can believe in”.  One slogan from Obama’s campaign is still true: WE ARE THE ONES WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR.

see

Democrats to propose national public healthcare plan; Would revolutionize US healthcare + What is Single Payer?

Bill Moyers Journal: Jeremy Scahill + Brooke Gladstone & Jay Rosen

Bill Moyers Journal: Single Payer Health Care

Stop the Single Payer Shut-out! by Ralph Nader