I saw that. Watching all of the people who had to walk away was pretty heart-breaking. I'm glad that they're doing what they're doing, but it shouldn't have to be that way.
Video at the CBS link, by the way. It's just embarrassing that this is the state of health care. Gah.
I think the work is "enabling": doing what it takes to keep a bad system afloat, helping it avoid the consequences of its own bad acts.
http://www.co-anon.org/enable.html
Yes well, at some point you just want people to get health care, regardless of how broken the system is, mmm? Similarly, needle exchanges are clearly part of the problem.
Maybe we can run a 3rd party candidate this year who will illustrate how the Dems are simply enablers of a bad system. Sound ike a plan?
I'll tell you what's a real enabler: food stamps. How are people ever going to push the government for real job training when they're eating semi-regularly?
Who will finally address the problem of Americans' debilitating addiction to health care?
Well, it's a conundrum, and I don't know what the aswer is. Yeah, I hate to see people die from lack of access to health care, but I don't see that private charity is more than a weak palliative.
I think I mentioned before that I'm facing a 35% increase in my health insurance premium on April 1, to a level I find shocking. Neither the Obama nor the Clinton plan look like solving the underlying problem: a market based health insurance system where the big money is made by shifting risks to someone else, finding reasons to deny or refuse coverage.
So other than 'burn shit down', I don't know what to do. If it takes burning shit down, then the charity is counterproductive.
I think the thing is that the charity is necessarily such a weak palliative that it won't distract anybody from the underlying structural concerns, and in the meantime will hopefully help some small number of those who need it.
That, and, anyone who uses the existence of charity as an excuse not to fix the system is clearly a Republican an asshole.
Here's a bit of a fact from Brad Delong: the average cost of premiums for a family health insurance plan is $12,106.
Now the federal minimum wage is, I think, still $5.35, which for a full time employee is about $11,000 a year. That's gross, not net. So health insurance alone costs a family far more than a minimum wage employee takes home. The system is well and truly fucked.
I hope that it's such a weak palliative as to be non-distracting. However, one of the consistent republican messages has been "private charity is always better than government programs" and this plays right into that article of faith. I'm sure there are people saying "see? All we need is a bit more private charity, and the problem is fixed, we don't need no single payor system"
href="http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/02/democratic-mess.html" rel="nofollow">http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/02/democratic-mess.html
crap. I still think and type slowly, and can't manage to learn HTML syntax. Sorry
I think the chief problem in the road of fixing the US health care system is the absolute conviction on the part of many Americans that their system is "the best in teh world".
That a Lifeline charity intended to help Third World countries is now spending half the time helping Americans, ought, properly publicized, to be yet another heads-up to Americans that they have the worst health care system in the developed world.
Granted, it would still be a long struggle to fix a health care system so profitable to powerful lobbyists - but the first step still needs to be having it accepted as a plain matter of fact that the US health care system is rotten bad and needs fixing, and the main roadblocks on the way to fixing it are the health insurance companies which benefit by it and the politicians they have in their pocket.
14: Michael, I saw the segment. The RAM guy said that the numbers of people who showed up had grown tremendously. He said he didn't know whether that was because RAM had gotten better known or because the health situation in this country had gotten worse.
The piece's slant was definitely: these aren't welfare queens; these are working people for whom healthcare is unaffordable; it's terrible that this situation exist in the wealthiest country in the world.
17: But if someone on Internet knows three people who used the service but have granite countertops then it means we do have the best health care system in the world. Things would even out that way.
But if someone on Internet knows three people who used the service but have granite countertops then it means we do have the best health care system in the world.
Jesur makes a good point, and JP is correct.
Right now, far too many people are still debating the question of whether the individual could afford health care. They see that 60 mins piece and look for signs of frivolous spending.