Just the Beginning

Teabaggers have ridiculed a man with Parkinson's, compared Obama to Hilter, threatened violence with guns, used racial slurs, and said health care is a privilege and not a right. Health care is a privilege? Are the Teabaggers so out of touch that they believe all working people can afford health care? I couldn't afford an extra $180 a month for insurance and that's with a $2500 deductible! Even with a good job I pay almost $100 a month but that includes dental and optical and a much lower deductible.

Here are several reasons why health care should be a right and not a privilege:

Drug resistant infections
out of control emergency rooms
new pandemics on the horizon
lost productivity
spiralling costs for everyone...

How about just the first point? For every infection that goes untreated and festers or for every patience that does not follow their medication regimen we are setting the stage for super bugs. TB now comes in a bright, new, shiny drug resistant strain, childhood illnesses once thought to be eradicated are making a comeback.

When I was in school we had immunization day. We were given Polio vaccines right in school. There have been cries, on the right, of socialized medicine invading our country and we are on a slippery slope to becoming a European style state but many of the people so violently opposed to the public option also received Polio Vaccines in Public schools, as well as other vaccines, TB tests, and fluoride treatments. There was a time when we as Americans all worked together to achieve great things and I was hoping we were about to experience a Renaissance but I was wrong. I was not so naive as to believe that Obama would be able to cure everything but he came with a message of hard work and pulling together and personal responsibility that I liked.

The reason I think this health care reform is a good start (but only a start) is that I hope it will put us on track for a single payer system. Or, if not a single payer system then establish a system of private NON-PROFIT insurers. We always hear about the English, Canadian, or French system but what about the German system?
excerpted from Germany’s Health Care System: It’s Not The American Way
by Uwe E. Reinhardt

First, Germany’s system is almost elegant in its simplicity. That is probably
no historical accident. Germans appear to understand the trade-off
between the operational simplicity of a system and its fairness and efficiency
in each particular instance...
Second, the ethical precepts driving German health policy differ substantially
from those driving American policy. Germans, along with other
Europeans and Canadians, view health care as part of the cement that binds
a people sharing the same geography into a genuine nation. All social
classes in Germany thus are made to share the same health care system.
About 90 percent of the population gains access to that system through one
social insurance scheme that is administered by some 1,000 fiscally independent,
semiprivate sickness funds operating under the constraints of a
federal statute. Only about 10 percent of the German population has
private commercial insurance, but they share the same health care delivery
system and merely enjoy more amenities.
Under Germany’s statutory insurance scheme, premiums are based on
ability to pay. With the financial burden of illness fully socialized in this
way, the system inevitably would be subjected to top-down global budgeting,
including controls on price and volume. Germany’s clear social ethic,
to which all political parties still pledge explicit allegiance, makes the
global budgeting described by these authors politically acceptable.
The United States never has had a one-tier health care system, and, as
the recent debate on health reform in Congress has demonstrated, the
United States never will have a one-tier health care system. A working
majority of the politicians representing Americans in the policy arena
evidently view health care as essentially a private consumption good of
which low-income families might be accorded a basic ration, but whose
availability and quality should be allowed to vary with family income. This
view lends official sanction to the following three-tier system: Tier I for
the low-income uninsured: a system of public hospitals and clinics that
rations health care severely through constraints on capacity. Tier II for
the insured, broad middle class: a system of competitive, integrated private
health plans budgeted on a per capita basis, with limited choice of providers
and with varying degrees of tacit rationing. Tier III for the Medicare
population and the moneyed elite: the traditional, open-ended, free-choice
fee-for-service health care system with little or no rationing of care.

The interesting thing is that this article was written in 1994 and things have not changed. Well what has changed is that we spend a great percentage of our GDP, 14% in '94 and over 16% now, Germany still only spends about 10%.

The Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland do not use a government-run, Medicare-like health insurance plan. They all rely on purely private, nonprofit or for-profit insurers that are goaded by tight regulation to work toward socially desired ends. And they do so at average per-capita health-care costs far below those of the United States — costs in Germany and the Netherlands are less than half of those here.

So really the Teabaggers are willing to risk another 1918 flu pandemic, or the rampant infection from the next superbug because they don't want to give any handouts... I am truly saddened at the level of hate this country has come to. Just wait for the immigration reform. If you thought health care was a fight you ain't seen nothin' yet