So I've just recieved the latest email from the OFA mailing bots asking me to donate fifteen bucks to help fund a campaign to reform healthcare. This of course comes on the heels of countless emails from the Florida Democratic Party's email bots (and I don't remember signing up for that list) asking for money in order to take over the state next year. My irritation at the Florida Democratic Party can wait for another post, but the healthcare question is one that's near and dear to my heart, being as that is my profession and passion.
While I'm not in any way adverse to donating money to a cause I stand for, in this case I feel as if I'm being asked to do so blindly. For those who have not yet heard, there have been -no- single-payer (look it up, type of healthcare system) advocates heard by the congressional panel who listened to all the heads of the insurance companies this past week. Not a one. For those of you in Canada and the UK (and as of now I think my only reader thus far is from the UK), you guys have a single-payer system.
I understand that the idea is to build upon the system we already have, as opposed to starting from scratch, and I can agree with that concept, but I cannot agree with leaving the improvements in the hands of the very same insurance companies who put us in this twisting mess of underserved populations, capitation, and an unequal ratio of cost to effectiveness. And frankly, let's remember that it is the insurance companies' jobs to make money, to profit. It is the duty of their executives to seek profit for their shareholders. It is not their duty to provide the best healthcare at the lowest cost. At the core, this is always a matter of market justice versus social justice, and the insurance companies are always on the side of market justice. I fear and believe that anything they come up with will be just a reshuffle of what we already have, and we'll be facing the same problems if not worse in another three or four decades.
On the other hand, one of the things this country has always done best is to take an idea from elsewhere and make it better. An amalgam of what we have, and what we want. I think that this is very possible to change things entirely and have true reform in the healthcare system. The foundation is already there in the County Hospitals across the country. Medicare needs to be scrapped outright, it's backwards, obsolete, and that doughnut hole gap is murderously unfair and unethical from a medical standpoint. Medicaid needs expansion across the board. Basic coverage for everyone regardless of age, income, or morbidity, with standardized catostrophic coverage included. Keep it within the system of county hospitals, expanding their role from just stabilizing to actually treating and curing. Then let the private hospitals fight it out and compete for the additionals. Keep the third-payer system that we now have, but put a single-payer safety net into place that will promote competition and price control on the third-payer companies.
And for the love of all that's holy, legalize medical marijuana at a federal level. Even with all the carcinogens contained in a single joint, it's -still- healthier in the longterm than putting someone on opiods. Hell, it's healthier than Tylenol. You can vaporize marijuana to protect your lungs, you can't protect your liver from acetaminophen.
Okay, let's wrap up this staple of the blogosphere quick like, so posts of more interesting content can begin.
I am a ~30 year old male, Irish, not white, living in Daytona Beach, Florida. Not quite sure if living is the right word for this town, but it'll do for now. I'm a student at a state college, studying to become a Registered Nurse First Assistant (look it up), provided I don't get the desire to enter Med. School outright. I'm poor as hell, been poor as hell for the vast majority of my life, but learned enough growing up in South Florida's sprawling metropolii to get by.
My family were pretty center-right, save for occasional flashbacks from my mother to her days amongst the Students for a Democratic Society (look that up too), and my grandfather's extremely liberal views (for an Irish-Catholic). I was raised, and up until this latest election remained, Republican. But not the snake-waving theocrats of today's G.O.P., instead I was raised on the principles of Personal Responsibility, Fiscal Responsibility, and the idea that it's no one's business what you do in your bedroom so long as no one gets hurt.
I'm the first male in my family's history not to join the military. Both my grandfathers fought in WWII, one as a marine in the Pacific Theater, one as an Army Officer on Project Manhattan (that would be the liberal one). My father fought in Vietnam, my uncles in both Korea and Vietnam (in their cases I wouldn't say fought, but they were there).
I enjoy rational discussions, and a quick tip on if someone's capable of those: If they're not willing to admit that they may be wrong, it's not a rational discussion. I also enjoy science, in all it's forms and branches. Quantum Physics is very, very interesting. Chess, poker (5 card stud, Jacks or better), Neil Rogers, music of all kinds though especially the madness of The Dead Kennedys, and the series of twisting and interconnecting tubes known as The Internets.
That should be pretty much everything, so now let's move on to something of greater substance.
