LET IT DIE

With the race for presidential nominations in full swing, I've been thinking a lot about health care lately. Everybody's got their plan and claims that they can help fix the system, but I wonder if that is true. I watched a show on CNN tonight, "Broken Government: Healthcare - Critical Condition," and I left it thinking about a few different things, but the main one was: let it die.

The show started with a sob story (sorry, but that's what it was) about well-off couple from the mid-west (I think) who had a baby with a rare disease which I cannot recall but which had a very low recovery rate. After the child was born they used their insurance to fly her across the country for 9 difficult operations over less than a year, from wherever they lived to Indiana, then from Indiana to California and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. Over less than a year they broke their limit of what the insurance company would pay for care (over $2,000,000) so they continued to pay for it themselves. A few months later their child died, but by that point they were already $700,000 in debt to their surgeons/doctors/hospitals. Now, they are complaining that if they had "better health care," their daughter would have survived. I want to preface this by saying that I am a very caring person and I hate to hear stories about those who die before their time, whether it be babies, soldiers, puppies, or what have you, but that is just ridiculous. To say that you are owed (by your insurance company or the government) over $2,700,000 to try and push recovery from a disease that has such a low chance of survival is insanity.

Having grown up in this welfare state perhaps many of us do not understand that concept. Perhaps the technological and medical advances that we have made over the last 50 years make people thing that no matter what the disease, it can and should be cured. I don't believe that this is the case. It does seem that we have made discoveries that miraculously cure people from incurable diseases, but nothing works 100% of the time, and there are plenty of medical problems that have an extremely low chance of recovery, even with treatment. Like I said before, I am a very compassionate and caring person, but I'm just trying to be level-headed here. And before you jump all over me, this is coming from someone who's mother had cancer, was treated and came through. I thought for a while that she was going to die, and we were just damn lucky that she worked at a hospital and had great insurance, or perhaps she would not have made it. If we had done what I am advocating now she probably would have died, and considering my current position on the subject I really don't know how to feel about that. I'm just glad she's alive, and that this all happened well before I was forming my own independent political and social views.

However, there is another angle to consider here. What I am speaking to is only our currently insurance/health-care system. There are other, better, systems that I would advocate for us and that could potentially solve problems like those described above. And no, the answer is not the comically awful plan offered by many politicians of "Universal Health Care" under which every citizen who is not homeless, a child or below the poverty line is forced (they call it "mandated") to buy health care in what will end up being as big a farce as Social Security once enough money is in the fund that the government can borrow some to further the war effort. No, the answer is a reduction in the size and scope of our ridiculously over-funded military. As I have mentioned before, we are spending more on "Defense" than the next 25 countries COMBINED spend. And we wonder why French health care is rated the best in the world! Hmmmm, perhaps they are not maintaining over 820 military installations throughout the rest of the world? Perhaps they don't have troops in 39 other countries who are all paid for by their countries' tax dollars? Perhaps they are not spending well over 500 BILLION dollars per year on "Defense," which does not even include the BILLIONS of dollars that are being spent on a fruitless war in the Middle East?

We, as a country, have to choose what we want. What we've chosen, and what we've allowed to be pushed on us, is a system in which instead of ensuring that every one of our citizens is safe, healthy and has a solid shot at a good job, we ensure that the military-industrial complex is fully stoked at every moment and that we have a military presence throughout every hemisphere and at every rounded corner of the globe. No matter what and how strong the influence, this is a choice that we have made as a country, which is why you can find people who have no insurance and three sick children who still think we should bomb Iran. We can choose the health of our citizens over the perceived dominance of our Empire, but we have decided that we won't. Until people wake up and realize that they are sacrificing the quality of just about every social program ever conceived for the scope of our Empire, we will continue to do so. And that is a damned shame.