HEALTH CARE

I have written before about health care and now I write again. I hear the phrase health care reform and somehow it makes me think that somehow, some place people are working to reform the way health care works, when in essence all they are doing is some unethical shell game of who is going to pay for it. Nothing is changing with the drug companies or the hospital networks prices. They just want some outside entity to subsidize the price so people can afford it. This does nothing to lower the price of health care. News flash! Tax money is our money. The drug companies offer the billions they are paying for researching new drugs as the reasons for the high costs but what good does your new drugs and new therapies do when no one but the rich can afford them. It’s as if you are taunting ordinary people with your magic pills and saying, “Want some? You’ll have to pay for it.”

Try to make sense of what that smiling little crook from Epipen had to say to congress a year ago when they were so concerned and brought him in for questioning. Yet today the price for that device, that costs little to produce, and has been around for a long time, is still through the roof. Thanks Congress for nothing. Whose side are you on? Health care has the potential and already has; bankrupted companies and people that can’t afford to pay the premiums. It’s in every political debate. Other countries have made great strides in this but somehow this country doesn’t know how. Swallow your ego Washington and look around you, across the borders where quality health care exists. The answers are there if you want to pay attention to what you see and not the advice you hear and get, from big pharma.

 My son is a retired cop, way to young for Medicare, who has to pay for his own health care for him and his wife. He works part time as a security guard in a hospital. The wages are not good, the health care benefits are. So in essence he works for health care. It used to be you worked for wages and health care was a benefit but for him at least, it’s the primary reason he has to work.

There will never be a perfect health care system because of our two political ideologies that both have their own stubborn ideas on what health care should look like. One side wants free health care for everyone. They say elect me and I will straighten this whole mess out. They never say how and they never say where the money is going to come from. Then we have the other side that leans heavily toward capitalism. A free market they call it. That might work if you had capitalism that wasn’t run amok with greed. Their greedy plan omits way to many people. Government of the people, by the people and for the people does not exist in this country. It exists only in textbooks and old cliques that date back to when our government was formed. . We have government by the lobbyists and for the lobbyists and they are the ones who rule our form of government and they will never quit until they have squeezed every last penny out of the people, as wrong as that is-- Washington should be charged with aiding and abetting.