As we know, the NHS is quietly on the way to being privatised. Whilst the system is not set to change over to the American system immediately – I thought the articles from the USA today were very interesting. Here is the first, from congressman Mo Brooks. Enjoy reading the Independent article and then watch the video:
Poor people don’t deserve healthcare because they haven’t led good lives
Quite the charmer, isn’t he?
Here is the third entry, from Congressman Tom MacArthur:
Personal tragedy drives deal making GOP congressman on health care
Now this last article is quite complex, the congressman is proposing a corporate solution to a public health issue – he proposes that states accommodate higher cost patients at their own discretion, based upon a system where they can opt out of full coverage healthcare insurance schemes. So having a baby will cost you lots of money in some states because they have opted out of mandatory maternity cover, but should your baby then have cancer, the state may or may not have a financial pool to pick up the increased cost of insurance. Otherwise, the insurance companies have the option to simply charge anyone with pre-existing conditions more for being ill rather than opting people out of the system on the basis of their illness altogether.
Now he does this on the basis that, unusually for a republican, he is aware that it may well happen, and in fact has happened to him, twice. His background in the insurance industry has made him unusually clued up on the issue of insurance. Here we see the great failure of the American healthcare and political system.
Rather than showing concern for the victims of their piss-poor idea of taking care of their own people, he cites the example of himself and his father, both of whom certainly have a work ethic, but no apparent sense of responsibility for direct care. You cannot be in two places at once, had either him or his father had direct responsibility for caring, they would have been unable to fund medical care at all, but rather than reflect upon this, he comes up with a corporate solution to a public health issue that again shits on the poor and unwell.
The Republicans would seem to be desperate to prove that there is a corporate solution to everything, that corporations are capable of showing some responsibility towards their victims/customers, and that everything will mysteriously work itself out, regardless of people’s individual circumstances or the level of understanding at state level.
Having worked in hundreds of different places in my life, the understanding of his policy is likely to be limited. Rules will be misinterpreted, states will get it wrong, the public will be told by a bored receptionist that no, they cannot get any help with their stroke/cancer/brain injury and that they are uninsurable. People will try several places and simply give up and watch their loved ones die.
This of course, does not matter to a conservative, as long as their costs are kept down and they aren’t held back by the great unwashed. This is the reason they become fearful in later life. Having spent so many years shitting all over everybody else, they suddenly realise that they too, require help and nobody is available to provide it because they need to amass their own pile of not very self-protective cash.
The system of American healthcare, and the idea that it will never happen to you is laughable to us in Europe, because of our more advanced idea of social conscience that they were so eager to stamp out when they smashed their unions. My grandfather was lured to the USA on the promise of work in the 1920s, only to find out that he was expected to be a scab, whereupon as a good communist he left rather quickly.
I was asked whether I wanted to move to the USA in 1998 when I was touring and playing backgammon.
“No,” I replied “I could not live in a country where I know perfectly well that people are dying of poverty. I actually had no idea that the NHS was as important to me until I was actually here with people who just don’t get it. This is not a civilised country.”
The same thing goes for food in the USA. Mo Brooks, above, blames people for smoking, drinking or eating the wrong thing, yet there is no question of shutting down the providers of poison. No question of the corporation showing the responsibility and education he expects from the individual.
Their ideas of ‘cheap food at any cost’ have led to suffering all over the world, from smallholders losing their farms to people who can afford American chemicals and trucks, to the infestation of patented life in the form of seeds. GM and hybrid crops from America are economic and agricultural invasion, not supplied, as they say to prevent starvation, but supplied to make the poor poorer and starve them out, and to create a smaller population of more malleable landowners.
If we are to survive as an independent nation, we should be more wary of America generally. They are extremely fond of money, and they are not responsible citizens of the world. I am with Prince Charles. There is no reason at all why Britain should not, as an island be the purveyors of clean food and clean politics, rather than becoming immersed in the complex deception and domineering double talk employed by the Yanks in the course of their complete disrespect for the poor, whatever country they are unfortunate enough to be poor in.
