August 4, 2009
our bodies are NOT for sale
Those who have health insurance are paying way too much for our coverage to companies that generally bet against us. Unlike our doctors, these companies are not being run by people who are experts on health. They are run by people who are experts on how to make money. Well last time I checked, my body and your body is not for sale. But the insurance companies seem to be under a different impression. They are interested in being middle men that block our abiity to have a healthy relationship with our doctors. Further, by having a stranglehold on the health care system there are a tremendous amount of Americans stuck in jobs they hate but dare not leave because doing so will take away their and their families’ health insurance.
To be a professional artist in the United States is not only a career risk, it’s a health risk. To leave an office where the boss abuses you every day could also be a health risk. This is a threat to people’s mental health and family lives. It does not help people stay in their marriages when they are miserable for being forced to stay in abusive job situations. So much for “family values.”
But even with an abusive job that provides health insurance, the health insurance company does everything it can to block important tests. Under this health care system money is rewarded to those who can save money – not save lives. Apparently medicine is not about saving lives. It’s about making the very rich, richer and manipulating everyone elses lives as if our bodies and the bodies of people we love were nothing more than for sale signs. We’re not. As people, we are beautiful, sacred, dare I say “magical” – we inhabit bodies whose cells work in an unbelievably intricate way to give, receive, and coordinate the very body that you are in right now. The fact that you are able to read or hear these very words is nothing short of a miracle. In essence, we by the nature of our very existence are miracles and we should build a society based off of faith in that assumption. The sooner we get the health insurance companies to stop treating us like we aren’t, the sooner most of us will realize that we are.
But this is not to even mention the 50 million people without health insurance. Nor does it mention the FACT that WITH those 50 million people and the pretty shoddy health care the rest of us have, we’re still spending far more per capita than countries that I’ve been to where the health coverage is conclusively better.
But oh no! If I say this, our friends in the right wing blogosphere may claim that I’m a socialist. Okay. Let me say for a minute that socialism and capitalism are “isms” and “isms” confined to narrow ideologies no longer serve humanity, if they ever did in the first place. “isms” are so twentieth century. Welcome to a new world. But Americans fear the word “socialism” like Wizards feared “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.” Yet those very same Americans claim to respect the police and fire fighters. BUT the police and fire fighters run under socialized systems. There was a time when firefighters were privatized. Towns would pay the fire company that arrived at the fire first. This system worked so terribly that soon fire fighting became “socialized” – much the same way that our school system, highways, and so much more are socialized. And yet almost every single plan to reform health care right now would not actually be “socialism” in any classic definition of the word.
However, health insurance companies – the ones who think our bodies are for sale do not want the system to be better for human beings – they want us to stay in the subservient system to which we are currently subjected. And they have invested millions and millions of dollars in sending out the equivalent of Inquistorial Squads to harass Congress people and do what ever it takes to make the current debate around health care not a debate at all but an onslaught of confusion. Our “Daily Prophet” aka the mainstream media continue to complain that health care policy is a boring topic – regardless of the fact that this topic may save the lives of millions of people and boost the US economy thereby creating jobs and an easier life for people throughout the US. And what they aren’t reporting is that some of these people in that the insurance companies are orchestrating to shut down honest debate are coming to rallies where they are comparing any one interested in people’s health care to Nazis, physically threatening those seeking reform, and turning town hall meetings into fist fight brawls. Ugh.
Look. It’s time we have an honest debate here – not one where the Malfoys with all of their influence and money use that influence and money to destroy debate and to destroy the livelihood of the American people. Do they really think our bodies are for sale? Because they are not.
nddulac
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Hear, hear! It is morally reprehensible that a basic necessity of human existence, such as health care has become a for-profit industry. And it should be obvious that the case against health care reform is based on a misinformation campaign when so many dollars were spent fighting reform before a single word of a single ball defining it had been written. And then training peopel on how to disrupt “town meetings” in the name of “protecting open public conversation” when in fact what they are doing is preventing it. Despicable!
Lisa
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Amen to this post! I couldn’t agree more. Dumbledore surely would support the right to health care for all. <3
Dan from the Slugland
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I know you guys have good intentions, but if you wish to know what happens when a government bureaucrat is allowed to decide which treatment is cost effective, google “herceptin bikers”.
Jenni
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I have to say this is a very important issue to me. I not only have several family members and close family friends who work in medicine, but I will soon be joining the ranks of the 50 million uninsured due to being forced to leave a job because of an abusive working environment.
People see health care policy as boring because there are so many important aspects to discuss and the average American’s attention span just doesn’t last that long anymore. Plus, there isn’t any sexy celebrity scandal, so why would the average American care?
I agree that it’s time for serious, educated debate about health care reform. Is there any forum left where that can happen?
Katy_Black
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omg I totally agree. Great post
Shandi
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I agree completely with Jenni. I think it’s high time that an educated debate on the subject appears somewhere. Most of what you hear about it are just people saying, “It’s good! You are an idiot if you decry it!” or “It’s a bad horrible thing, and we shouldn’t do it,” when neither are completely right.
My only problem is we aren’t being told what is going into health care reform. We aren’t being told what we are going to be paying for, and it’s not fair to us.
Katy
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I agree with several of the above that we need a serious, educated debate about health care. Please allow me to provide the other side of this debate.
Our health insurance system is flawed, yes. But so is the alternative that is being presented to the American people. My first point is relatively simple: what this post fails to realize is that while there are SOME ‘plants’ from the health insurance industry at these town hall meetings, many of the other people speaking out are simply concerned citizens seeking information that has not been given to them. It is also important to note that there are plants from the other side as well, who are paid to speak in favor of nationalized health care. Don’t believe me? Check Craigslist. Seriously.
People who are uninsured by choice also need to be taken into account. I know of several people who are young, healthy, and with no family to worry about, who have opted out of the health insurance offered by their workplaces. One of my neighbors said that for his situation, he spends less money just paying for the doctors’ visits and such throughout the year than he did while he was on his company’s insurance. These people need to be accounted for in the statistics for the uninsured. I know there aren’t as many of them, but they do exist.
Finally, while I do agree that the health insurance industry needs to be reformed, completely nationalizing will not really change anything. In countries with national health care, the people who are covered by the government deal with extreme waiting lists for the most basic treatments and with the doctor that they are told to go to. Not the doctor of their choice. As for more advanced treatments: same deal. If you look at the percentages of people who die from various ailments, the percentages are higher in countries with nationalized health care than in places like America. This is because people die waiting for their treatment. People in Canada come HERE for treatment. Why? Because they can’t get it there. The way people have solved the problem of waiting for treatment is by going right back to private insurance. People pay for private insurance, and then they don’t have as long of a wait for doctors, they can choose their own doctors, etc. The end result is the people who can afford private insurance get to cut in front of lines of people on the national plan. The people on the government’s plan might as well be uninsured. In order to pay for this national plan that changes nothing, taxes are incredibly high – in some countries it even goes to 50% of their paycheck. Countless American families are spending less money a year on health insurance than they would in taxes for this nationalized plan, my family included. The fact is, the national health care plan that the U.S. is seriously considering is no different than the many other failed programs like it in other countries, and it will cost the taxpayers obscene amounts of money when we are already in a recession. This is not the answer.
So what is? Our system needs work. Insurance costs need to be brought down, and it can be done. Take, for example, the malpractice attorneys, who are there at every turn to squeeze the last dime out of doctors who, in most cases, did nothing wrong. Doctors must buy insurance against these cases, which means they must charge their patients more, which means insurance for these patients goes up. Reform in this area would lower insurance costs. I say the answer is tweaking the existing system – making it better, cheaper, and hopefully a little more caring.
I know this is long, and if you finished it, thank you for sticking with me. I am a conservative person in a fairly liberal fandom, so I am sure many people here might disagree, and I welcome that! I hope that these points will at least be considered, and I also hope that any responses will be civil, in the very least. You want serious, educational debate? Here I am!!
Danielle
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Andrew and Katy,
You both did a very nice job of explaining your side of the debate. Thank you for that! This is a very important topic, and it is certainly a discussion that we should be having. However, the coverage that I see on television really isn’t that informative. It seems to be mainly people yelling with very little explanation of what they’re yelling about. I know that I can dig deeper for more information, but I also know that the majority of people are not going to do this. They are going to simply stick with the mainstream media. The mainstream media needs more well-spoken (or well-written) explanations, as you have each given for your respective side of the debate.