Cable channels & MSM are saturated with impeachment coverage. Healthcare rates remain unaffordable. We cannot ignore the Medicare for All battle and others. Let’s walk, chew gum, read, and think at the same time.
When Trump gets impeached, whether removed from office or not, the euphoric sugar high will be shortlived. Why? The declining path of the poor and the middle-class remains on the same trajectory since the inception of supply-side, voodoo-economics, Reaganomics.
Gen Zs, Millennials, and Gen Xs will still be in insurmountable debt. Parents will still have no choice but to compromise the wellbeing of their kids with expensive substandard childcare. Immigrant children and adults will still wake up to the stresses of living under a cloud of uncertainty. Many Americans will live under the uncertain quality of the water they drink and the food they eat. The deficit fueled debt will continue to rise because of continual irresponsible wealth transferring tax cuts to the rich putting our social safety net at risk. Our infrastructure, roads, bridges, airports, ports, and buildings, are falling apart as we fall behind many other industrialized countries. Health insurance remains either unaffordable or unusable because of high deductibles and co-pays even as countries implementing a version of Medicare for All are healthier, less stressed, and unconcerned about medical bankruptcy.
Impeaching Donald Trump solves none of those problems. Republican politicians, in their callous disregard for humanity and family values they purport to stand for, have convinced enough of their constituents who would benefit from solving the above-mentioned problems that they are unattainable. No, we can’t.
Our biggest concern should be what many in the Democratic Party consider too Progressive to be presidentially viable. That is neither what the polls say nor what a humane belief dictates. As has been mentioned ad nauseam, the Progressive policies articulated above all poll way north of 50%. These are policies both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been championing for decades between them both.
Americans are hurting. One of the problems is we are so good at suffering in silence. And those doing marginally well are the most politically active because they either have the time, money or both which tend to skew the options. As an example, those with great corporate or negotiated union health insurance many times see fighting for comparable insurance for the rest of Americans, (most), as a benefit they must give up. And that is what our plutocracy attempts to inculcate in the brains of all. Instead of realizing that the fight is for ALL to have great health insurance we can all afford because we remove the legalized thuggery from the system (pilfering by the pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, and hospitals), we take our eyes off the ball. Those responsible for deaths or bankruptcy of hundreds of thousands every year do it solely for a profit.
This was brought close to home this week. My wife told me a story this weekend that should hurt all of us to the core. A relative of one of her friends died last week. It turns out she got into a car accident and got banged up. She was taken to the hospital. They wanted to scan her head but because of the cost even with insurance, she said no and went home. Two weeks later she died of a massive brain hemorrhage. The evil, selfish, inhumane, degeneracy of our healthcare system kills our citizens.
A reader of one of my blog posts on healthcare sent me the following message yesterday. “I had a Heart attack, “my reader wrote. “BCBS denied All claims first and foremost stating that the procedures were not pre-approved. It was literally the first time I even tried to use my health insurance. I was only on it for 3 months before I had my event.” Think about it. That one episode likely caused a complete financial detour that he will have to live with for the rest of his life.
And then this from my good friend Danny Fetonte, one of the hardest working activists, union leader, and environmentalist I know.
I am in the hospital with a rare cancer. Due to the cancer my left arm was amputated. The doctor asked me if I had worked in industry because I had remnants of working in industry in my lungs. I worked at Bethlehem Steel for 4 years and other industrial jobs for another 9 years. The doctor said the cancer from the tumor in my arm had metastasized to my lungs. The tumors in my lungs had attached themselves to the areas in my lungs that had been weakened due to the industrial waste.
I started complaining in March of this year about pain in my arm. My waiting time was six months and that was with Medicare and a good union insurance plan. Many Americans without a good insurance plan would have had to wait years and those with no insurance would have ended up in the emergency room half dead with cancer.
We have an insurance system not a healthcare system. It is wrong what we have.
Absolutely everything those who oppose Medicare for All assume would happen with Medicare for All is what actually happens under our private health insurance system that rations products and services for profit and bonus maximization for shareholders and overpaid executives. We do not have a government takeover of healthcare in America. We have a profit take over of healthcare where the sick is simply the mechanism to extract wealth. Most countries with their versions of Medicare for All are healthier and NO ONE goes bankrupt nor is concerned ever to get healthcare.
There are so many reasons why I am adamant about pushing Medicare for All. As I have written in many blogs, it is a mathematical fact that a single-payer Medicare for All healthcare system is the only system that has the ability to economically and affordably ensure every American has health care. The math is absolute. The plutocracy is investing millions to find false reasons to have you deny math (Partnership for America’s Health Care Future). They want you to ignore the fact that your premiums must first pay billions to million-dollar executives, shareholders, duplicate services and much more. They must deny you as much healthcare as they can get away with to maximize their profits.
Comparable stories can be told for just about every Progressive policy that needs to be implemented in the country. To be clear, the money is there to pay for it all. One should remember two things. If there are available bodies to work and there is work to be done and we are unable to connect the two then it means we have a failed economic model. We forget too often that an economic system must be made to serve humanity and not the other way around. Secondly, our current economic system is flawed in that it allows the accumulation of wealth by the undeserved instead of a logical distribution that allows all access to the success they are willing to work for. The current system allows hoarding which must be mitigated via a tax system that corrects said aberration. The indoctrination must end.
We can impeach Trump. But as bad as he is, he is not our biggest problem. Our biggest problem is the lack of vision of most of our politicians. Like most Americans, they remain slaves to the corporations, to the wealthy few. When they get off their rare ends, when we force the issue that reminds us all that there is still one vote per person, when we assert our worth, we will make the change. 2020 gives us the opportunity for a rebirth. Let’s take it.