I tried to find the Republican sponsored commercial that depicts a Washington bureaucrat (who looks suspiciously like an IRS agent caricature) interposing himself between a patient and her doctor. What the ad doesn't say is that we have that now. Replace "Washington Bureaucrat" with "Insurance Agent". No difference.
What, you've never watched your doctors fighting with the insurance company to attempt to justify care? I have. I watched my Dad's doctors more or less blackmail the insurance company to get them to approve an "experimental" procedure that has extended his life far beyond the year or so he had in 2001. He's enjoying time with his grandchildren today. If that doctor had capitulated, my dad would have died when his oldest grandchild was a baby. This is the healthcare system Republicans want to protect. They have a financial interest in doing so, not a humanitarian one. Republicans warn that Obama wants to destroy our healthcare system. Damn straight! We want to destroy the broken system that only works for the insurance companies and replace it with something that works for everybody.
The problem here is that in a Democracy (which is what the United States claims to have, if you weren't aware), the Government is supposed to be afraid of the people, not the people afraid of the Government. If the government were truly afraid of the people, Universal Healthcare would not be a debate at all. Ask yourself honestly, are you afraid of the Government, or is it afraid of you?
Insurance companies are spending millions of dollars with anti-reform commercials and buying Washington votes. Why? Do they have the best interests of the American People at heart, or are they interested in the billions to be made under the current system which routinely denies needed care to millions? They're afraid, because they know that every other industrialized country in the world has universal healthcare and it works. They know that our system of paying huge insurance premiums is entirely concocted and unnecessary. They don't want you to know that.
Did you catch that? The crutches that cost $15 in Canada were $45 in the U.S.? We must have some damn good crutches here in order to charge 3 times as much. Right?
I expect the first conservative to come across my post will respond with something like "If you think it's so much better in Canada, why don't you move there?" This probably seems like good logic to them. When you don't really understand logic, it's easy to miss a fallacy.
I believe in America and I believe we can fix this. I don't want to move to Canada, I want the United States' healthcare system to be the envy of the world, not the laughing stock it is today. You should too.
