If you’ve been watching the health care debate, you know that it’s looking like it’s going to tank. The White House press secretary recently said that the Obama Administration was willing to look at all options and that the basic goal was to make the health care industry more competitive and therefore better for consumers. Over the weekend President Obama was in Colorado campaigning for his health are reform where he said “All I’m saying is, though, that the public option, whether we have it or we don’t have it, is not the entirety of health care reform,” - I don’t know about you, but to me that sounds like a pretty big concession towards the fact that things are not going at all like they’re supposed to. What it really means is that the Lobbies have gotten their way, as they often do and that Americans once again are left wondering (or not) why the rest of the industrialized nations can pull something off we somehow don’t seem able to.
Let’s take a look at what we can do as a nation from a different angle. Have you ever wondered what it took to build a railway across the United States? Do you know how many thousands of people died to make this happen? Do you know how many mountains needed to be blasted through with dynamite to create a way of passage? It’s staggering. But you don’t even need to go that far back in history to find out what we’re capable of as a country. We’ve built the greatest weapons of the world such as the Atom Bomb, The Stealth Bomber but somehow we’re not able to establish a life style in the United States that most countries would consider the “default”. What I mean by default is a life style where the state does have certain responsibilities and the services it provides are in part to serve the public good.
According to Wikipedia, this year’s defense budget is half a trillion dollars. One more time: half a trillion dollars. Now of course our soldiers need to be paid, and our ammo needs to be purchased, I’m not going to pretend these costs don’t exist. However, when I look at the fact that our military and by that I mean the actual men and women in uniform haven’t gotten the proper equipment they need, it makes you wonder where the money is going.
If you’ve paid any attention at all to some of the news coverage we received from Iraq you very well know that the amount of money we sunk into that country that just got lost, is also completely staggering, Millions upon millions of dollars were sent to Iraq to help with “reconstruction” and various other sectors of the new Government that vanished.
From Bombs, to Fighter Airplanes and Tanks, our arsenal is large, and it keeps growing larger the only thing that doesn’t seem to grow is the concern for the American People. While the CEO of United Health made $130 million dollars in 2005, I’d like to see the comparative numbers of people who were denied health care that year – how many people he denied coverage, in order for his salary to go up.
This is what I think is so screwed up about our health care debate. Rather than centering on the blood sucking jackals that drain our health care system, we’re hearing the most ludicrous statements I’ve ever heard in US politics. A death panel? Really? People are you this stupid or paying so little attention that politicians can utter some of the most ridiculous statements and actually get away with it? It’s just mind blogging that any news agency is even carrying such stories.
This article was written by Alex - Author's Website
