This is my 200th post on Buenos Burritos, and I had planned to write something witty or funny for the occasion. Not today, amigos.
The issue of health care reform has got me seeing red. The American people are being bamboozled by insurance companies and the bozos we elected. And it's happening out in the open, not in hushed chambers or back rooms. What's that, you say, Mr. Baucus? It's totally legal for you to take money from drug and health insurance companies and lobbyists and then use your position on the Senate Finance Committee to craft bills in their favor, all while pretending to be a champion of health care reform?
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This is just completely and utterly insane. We can never hope to have reform of any kind until we remove the bribes and incentives from our elected officials' pockets.
Read this letter by Rita Batchley, a nurse from Ventura, California about the need for a single-payer system of health care. Her impassioned and eloquent letter comes from someone who works in our broken medical system every day, and sees firsthand the effects lobbyists and corporate interests have on ordinary people. Health care in this country is already rationed. Those who have the most money and power get the lion's share and control how the rest is meted out.
Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Pfizer, Merck and Aetna have no stake in keeping us healthy. Preventive care would eat into their profits. The health care industry spends millions of dollars every year on advertising enticing us to buy the new miracle drug of the month, (hello? viagra?) and millions more to defeat true reform.
Maybe the problem is that we even have a health care industry at all. We've made treating sick people into just another money making proposition, and the result is that sick people have more value than healthy ones in the current scenario.
This year we've come closer to making changes that count than we ever have before. We finally have a president with the guts to implement them, but he can't do it himself. Baby steps are not necessary. America is all grown up, and now is the time to make great strides forward. Your elected officials need to hear from you.
Tell them you're as mad as hell, and you're not going to take it anymore.
Tell them you're as mad as hell, and you're not going to take it anymore.
3 comments:
Hi, Jane,
I appreciate your comment about the dog I chose not to adopt. You are right about labs being potentially good dogs. But the dog we saw today is not the right dog for my family. He is a good dog, but not the right one for us.
I would think that all good dog lovers would approve when someone realistically understands that they are not the right owner for a particular dog.
I plan to help my friend who is now caring for him find a good home for him, but the point is to find the right home for him.
I am a little surprised at a very negative comment I got just before yours, so please excuse me if I am overly sensitive to your comment.
I want to see more action from President Obama, whom I voted for in the hopes that he would take drastic steps to enact needed reform on several fronts.
Ha ha, we learned in class the other day that that movie was racist, but I'm starting to think maybe that isn't quite as true as I imagined.
I have been on two conference calls set up through BlogHer with both demoocrat and repub sen. and reps and was able to ask a couple of very simple questions - questions they should have been able to answer but they were not and it made me angry as a wet hen.
And because they can't answer it, people like me who have insurance yet pay horrendous copays and deductibles are faced with losing their home or continuing medical care.
NONE of the plans out there address the issues that NEED to be addressed when it comes to MEANINGFUL health care reform. And as long as the the health care lobbyists and politicians are still in bed, nothing will ever get any better.
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