THE HEALTH CARE DEBATE AGAIN..... OBAMA IS THE FOURTH PRESIDENT TO RUN ON THIS ISSUE.... Perhaps the first to have a senate majority now that OUR HERO AL FRANKEN IS IN THE SENATE.... I have very high hopes for a man will at least be the funniest politician ever, hands down, period... STEWART SMALLEY WAS ART, MAN...
Yesterday, President Obama was speaking to the AMA here in town. A few of them boo'd him when he said he was not going to put caps on malpractice cases.
I love america. Where the American Medical Association is actually sleazy. Doctors. The ones you don't see on scrubs, or, gag, gag.... Gray's Anatomy. These are the guys who are worried that they might lose a couple bucks if the government has an affordable insurance plan. The middle man will be gone, and that has to save a few bucks, but also, the doctors will be forced to take the kind of low payments they now get from medicaid and medicare (many doctors do not even take these insurances, because they charge exorb ihant amounts).
Thank God for doctors. Some. Don't get me wrong. I am not quite so reactionary as to condemn an entire profession, like the Scientologists with psychiatry. Yes, psychiatry has brought its own set of problems into our society, but they have also benefited us greatly. A lot of physicians out there would get behind any kind of program that gets everyone insured.... which by the way, will more than likely save our society money in the end, if adequate preventive care is emphasized.
I don't see us being a society, anytime soon, when being a Doctor will not be a high paid profession.
President after president has refused to really stand up to the insurance companies and the AMA. Or if they did, they were swatted down. Handed their asses, basically, by the american system of checks and balances. Hearts in the right place or not, the political reality seemed to them that pleasing a narrow, influential set of people, like insurance lobbyiests and the clout they hold in Washington with various politicians, was more important than pleasing the vast, teeming masses without Health insurance. This is why a lot of people do not vote. Over and over people have said, Hey, We Need National Healthcare, four presidents have now run and won using this issue.
Clinton was not the first. Sometimes I get cynical and figure students of history know to offer this plum when running for the middle class and lower vote... students, artists, leftists, even socialists and communists get under the same flag for this one. To me, this issue was decided years and years ago, there needs to be nationalized healthcare - in the countries where it runs well, it is great. We should learn from them, as well as those we criticize and come up with a fucking great plan. We went to the fucking moon, we can figure out insurance.
Obama has to talk to all sides, listen to all concerns, take everything he can into account when making a decision, not rely on Dogma. He would have gotten nowhere in american politics if he had. I applaud his open mindedness, and community building skills. The Right and the Selfish may never go over to his side, and for some this will be because they have in their fucked up heads that their ideology trumps what seems true in the moment. Meaning, National Health Care seems like socialism/ and didn't the fascists have that?
If they can dismiss what Obama says with the least thought possible, all the better. Limbaugh would rather give someone a damning anecdote about Obama, real or fabricated, than spend the time researching what the news might mean if he could view the issue from more than his own, selfish side. Self serving people. They often win in this world.
The doctors are not this obtuse, of course. They have said for years that national healthcare would kill off medical research. That the drug companies would not spend money developing expensive drugs with no incentive.
Interesting use of the market here -- as if scientists will only work if there are big drug companies. Universities could do research, government could fund research. And of course, there would still be a huge market for new drugs, that could be sold to the government. Money is still there.
A few times in a societies life, they have to raise themselves up and look around at their fellows and do what is best. 46 Million have no isurance. People who don't end up flooding very expensive emergency rooms, when a visit to a neighborhood doctor would save society hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars. '
Just in the Chicago Area, the best doctors I have discovered to treat me for chronic pain are at Stroger Hospital, and before that Cook County. They'r great people, and since it is the inner-city, they are very aware of addiction issues, and almost always have kept me off narcotics, which is basically their practice. A few terrible flare-ups and they were there for me, but for the ten or so years I have been in Chronic Pain, I've taken a pretty mild mix of pills. Nothing a junkie would be very interested in. At least since I started refusing valium.
If the country goes national in insurance, Stroger Hospital will fianlly get paid for all the wonderful work they have done over the years. How many tens of thousands of people owe their lives to the simple fact that they live where there is a county hospital? Cook County does what it can with a limited budget, and will certainly get much better with the influx of cash. As will a lot of other hospitals throughout the country that cater to the indigent. In my life, with all of my surgeries, starting in 1967 with a surgery that cost 100,000 (a year in a hospital, experimental treatments, etc... )... what that would be today, I guess a million plus. Add to that various other surgeries and years of treatment, and I have sure as hell been on all sides of healthcare. Insured to the gills, uninsured and bancrupted by a hospitalization, then insured...
My experience with socialized medicene, at Cook County, and then Stroger, convinced me that the best doctors I had ever seen were at the Pain Clinic. I have tried others over the years, since they encourage one to have a primary physician, and though a few tried to take over my pain control, none were even close to the Pain Clinic at Stroger.
We better get everyone insured this time, or a lot of people are going to feel like no matter who is in the presidency, small, vocal minorities are going to fight for whatever financial power they have, and everyone else be damned. They are businesses. Run for the bottom line. Doctors and insurance companies and drug companies, a powerful group of people, who control a lot of money.
In all of these fields, there are of course exceptions. Probably all of them agree some change is needed, at least. Getting them to agree on what change impossible. Obama Needs to use this opportunity to get something radically correct passed. With Franken making the magic number 60 nin the Senate, they should just fucking finally do the right thing, and the FULFILL THE PROMISE OF NOW FOUR PRESIDENTS.... AT LEAST 46 MILLION PEOPLE INTHIS COUNTRY SHOULD BE REJESTERED TO VOTE, JUST TO KICK OUT ANYONE WHO VOTES AGAINST NATIONAL CARE THAT COVERS EVERYONE..... Let them choose their insurance, if they can compete. I doubt they will be able to compete very well, after my experiences at Stroger Hospital, who put all the MD''s I saw to shame.
We forget that a lot of countries use this system quite well, thank you.
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