usa - Ina Disguise

Corporatist Healthcare – a handy peep

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

https://www.facebook.com/ThisWeekABC/videos/1260450274053196/

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.

Learning from idiots

The recent use of idiocy in the USA to keep Donald Trump in the media, and overspill back in Scotland, is not the only thing which has caused me to ponder the value of being an idiot. Given that in terms of my emotional attachment to Wolfe, I too am a kind of professional idiot, I am now pondering the value of idiocy.

Trump has taken some minor financial hits in the last couple of days, Oman and Scotland have reported third party business losses as a result of his shameless self promotion and moronic self-regard. I wonder if he calculates this on a profit/loss basis? For a person hailed as a business expert, if he has not done this, then perhaps he makes his living shooting his mouth off and having other people use the convenient pun of his name for their own purposes. It would make more sense if people were looking at each other across the boardroom table, rolling their eyes and signing away fortunes on the basis of having the word Trump on the side of a building.

The spectacular headline that Trump would have made more money doing nothing, makes me think that running your mouth is an outstandingly popular activity in the idiocracy that is the USA. Certainly the examples we are shown here in the UK indicate that the American rich are similar to the lower middle classes, in terms of the glorification of self interest and lack of perceived duty and humility, something which I have always felt made us much stronger as a nation in the UK.

Recently, of course, we in the UK have taken to inviting foreign money to bolster the luxury market and conceal the fact that economically speaking, our government does not even remember the simple economic principles of Maggie Thatcher. Yes, she dictated that it was a good idea to kill off unsustainable nationalised industry, but nobody in the current government seems to have put this together with encouraging small to medium sized business, proportionately enormous employers, with enhancements to investibility and encouragement of the general population to risk everything replanting the economic garden by starting small businesses.

Perhaps we should have a Chancellor that can count, with a memory of thirty years ago so that he does not miss this crucial detail. Instead he is starving the poor in order to fund crappy and equally corrupt Labour PFI policy damage and fund his cronies in the defence industry, whilst everyone apparently sits at home and wonders why their respective riots are not reported on the media. We in Scotland are well aware that the media is suppressing information from little England. For the benefit of the terminally stupid Conservative voters, sitting in their ‘Alright Union Jack’ properties – try looking up DEMONSTRATION SUPPRESSED BY THE MEDIA and you will find a list of unreported action by students, anti-war protesters, people protesting the starvation of the disabled. We are being treated just as badly as the Americans in terms of the assumption that we are all too stupid to care that we are led by people too knuckle-draggingly dumb to be allowed out of the cocaine room at the private members club.

At this point in my life I am of the opinion that we should take this as a sign that no matter our history or our previous lack of confidence and motivation, we should take matters into our own hands. We need to find ways around the problem in terms of making use of things like crowdfunding, social capital and our own good ideas to regrow our own gardens. If you have harboured even the shred of a dream, have a look at how to make it work on a basis that the silly boys in Westminster cannot interfere with.

Likewise, my inability to make love work for me, no matter how much work I pour into expressing myself, should tell me that love is just not for me. I should give up on drilling my way through a shell of self protective superficiality and forget that Wolfe is actually a perfectly functioning and rather frightened person wrapped up in a blanket of bullshit. I should move on to someone that presents a facade of emotional competence, and wait for the inevitable conclusion that nobody knows what they are doing and it is all futile. I should not waste my time recovering from bad experiences, instead being aware that life is short, and since there is no actual truth, I might as well role play my way through the traditional markers of age and time. I should not make any effort to communicate. I should make distinctions between global politics and the vagaries of my own emotion. I certainly should not mix the topics, in case I confuse people determined to sleep their way through life and put full stops on it where none exist.

Perhaps what we should learn from idiocy, is that all progress is futile, because sooner or later, someone who prioritised money or power over knowledge decided that we just don’t matter. Nothing matters at all in fact, apart from making sure that we get more jelly beans from life than the idiot next to us.