No, of course it isn't, but thats beside the point.
Ever since Obama was inagurated and first occupied the Oval Office his leadership has been fraught with various conservative, Republican or deep southern controversy. If it wasn't about his birth, it was about his policies.
The purpose of the creation of a state based health system is to bring the insanely expensive and time-consuming current health system in America in to line with the systems in other Western countries like Australia and Canada. In fact the American system of health is so horrendous you can get cheaper, better health care in Cuba, or Venezuela.
The simple fact is that the current system is in-ordinantly expensive and slow and compared to systems in countries with far less robust economys, disgustingly ineffective.
To take an example, I'm currently a resident of Australia, we have a state based health-care system known as Medicare, you can join the Ambulance Association for a minor fee each year you can completely avoid paying ambulance travel fees, when I was seriously injured in 2004 during a skiing accident and was airlifted back to Melbourne to undergo CT scans of my upper spine and neck the fee would have been in excess of $5000, yet because of my membership in the Ambulance Association and my public health care, not only did I not pay for the transport I also was re-imbursed for the following medical treatment for the damage to my body.
Compare this to my experience in America a year earlier, I broke my leg in a skiiing accident in Beaver Creek, Colorado. I was picked up by Ski Patrol, loaded into an ambulance and taken to the medical center. My leg was set and two xrays were taken to determine it was set correctly before i was discharged with some pain-killers.
Total cost?
In excess of $8000, which luckily was covered by my travel insurance, althought they no longer agree to cover me overseas >.<
If either of the above stories were to occur to an American citizen on American soil who had no private health care, they would have to pay the costs immediatly, and if surgury was required but was not urgent, they would have to pay up-front.
This is why Obama wants and needs to fix the US health care system, this isn't a socialist/nazi/communist plan. Although it has some socialist influence it is not a bad thing, infact it is a very good thing, socialised health-care works as demonstrated in far less capable nations around the globe.
And for those arguing that the government cannot compete with private business, again look at your fellow democratic and capitalist nations to see it in action. In Australia the government ran telecommunications for decades, it also runs our train and tram systems. Not only do these organisations run as government bodies, or had untill being privatised, they were very competitve with private business, and greatly encouraged market growth and the lowering of prices in general.
Without a doubt Obamacare has very little wrong with it, if you are idiotic enough to listen to the conservative and Republican propoganda about its supposed "Nazism" then I guess I have only one response for you.
To quote Congressman Barney Frank "Trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table."
Until next time,
Jesse
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Funny -- I didn't think that monkeyshoulders could possess such a strong grasp of grammatical structures and relevant social issues. You are truly an example to monkeyshoulders and other mammalshoulders everywhere.
ReplyDeleteA few more painfully insightful and relevant perspectives:
ReplyDelete1) There's currently a state-appointed healthcare plan in place, also called Medicare, for residents of the United States over the age of 65. The administrative budget for Medicare hovers around 1% of its total cost, while its private counterparts spend 20% to 30% of their budgets on the very same administrative tasks. No, medicare isn't a wholly comprehensive plan, with 9 out of 10 eligiable citizens seeking private healthcare to supplement their private care, but it's still a comprehensive publicly-subsidized health care initiative that's taken care of our country's elderly for the past 45 years.
2) Obama's plan would, in simple terms, extend this same efficient and comprehensive plan to citizens of all ages, not just the elderly. Doctors express a vast ease in and preference for dealing with medicare as opposed to private health insurance companies. It is in the nature of private health care companies to treat their patients only as customers, not as human beings, and commonly deny service to those customers where they find opportunities to create large returns for their stockholders. It's a terrifying truth about private healthcare in general, and one that can only be curbed by making available to citizens a competitive, public healthcare plan that will bring into balance the off-kilter priorities of private healthcare providers, and bankrupt those who don't aren't truly acting in the interest of the greater, societal good.
3) It's vastly more expensive to allow anyone in the country to live without healthcare than without it. For a number of reasons. Philosophically, if a society exists only because of the actions and existence of the people that comprise it, what greater interest could there be within that society than the health or preservation of those individuals. As human beings we inherently value life above all else (prior to, at least, being exposed to capitalistic principles in which currency often holds greater valuation than life itself), and should be human enough to recognize that the loss of human life, regardless of the apparent impact or scope of that life, denotes a marked setback for that society in terms of human and societal resources.
Then there is, of course, the literal expense. It's enormously expensive by comparison to deny treatment to those without health benefits, or to force them into bankruptcy as a result of performing expensive medical procedures, compared to simply, as a society, building into our economy a safeguard for these individuals that guarantees that mild maladies are never allowed to degenerate into life-threatening illnesses. From a capitalistic perspective it makes a great deal of sense to treat these problems, which society is going to have to shoulder or be burdened with in one way or another, early rather than to wait until they're aggravated and expanded to the point at which not only is society now shouldering the expense and human resources for a problem that is now much greater than it should ever have been allowed to become, the people who have fallen victim to these now exacerbated health issues will become a greater burden to society in all other capacities, either a dependency on the state for income through social security, or by the worsening their situations to the point at which they're driven to crime, or apathy, or suicide.
I know that this is a bit of a grim perspective on it all, but it is the reality with which we are faced, and one for which a solution is vastly clear and simple compared to the shouting and misconceptions with which it has been suffocated.