[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Sullivan noticed a man with a T-shirt that read “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The shirt had Arabic and English script warning motorists not to come too close or risk being shot.The man, an Iraqi veteran, was putting on a pack and told us that he was the caretaker of a campsite.He said he left the Army a year ago, drifted, drank too much, and worked at a bar as a bouncer.His life was unraveling.He then answered an ad for a park caretaker.The clouds hovering on the peaks above us were an ominous gray.The caretaker said he planned to beat the rain back to the tent site.I thought of Earl Shaffer.“You try and forget the war but you carry pieces of it with you anyway,” the caretaker said.“In the mountains, at least, I can finally sleep.”Obama’s Health Care Bill Is Enough to Make You SickJULY 12, 2010A close reading of the new health-care legislation, which will conveniently take effect in 2014 after the next presidential election, is deeply depressing.The legislation not only mocks the lofty promises made by President Barack Obama, exposing most as lies, but sadly reconfirms that our nation is hostage to unchecked corporate greed and abuse.The simple truth, that single-payer, nonprofit health care for all Americans would dramatically reduce costs and save lives, that the for-profit health care system is the problem and must be destroyed, is censored out of the public debate by media that rely on these corporations as major advertisers and sponsors, as well as a morally bankrupt Democratic Party that is as bought off by corporations as the Republicans.The two-thousand-page piece of legislation, according to figures compiled by Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP), will leave at least twenty-three million people without insurance, a figure that translates into an estimated twenty-three thousand unnecessary deaths a year among people who cannot afford care.It will permit prices to climb so that many of us will soon be paying close to ten percent of our annual income to buy commercial health insurance, although this coverage will pay for only about seventy percent of our medical expenses.Those who become seriously ill, lose their incomes, and cannot pay skyrocketing premiums will be denied coverage.And at least $447 billion in taxpayer subsidies will now be handed to insurance firms.We will be forced by law to buy their defective products.There is no check in the new legislation to halt rising health-care costs.The elderly can be charged three times the rates provided to the young.Companies with predominantly female workforces can be charged higher gender-based rates.The dizzying array of technical loopholes in the bill—written in by armies of insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists—means that these companies, which profit off human sickness, suffering, and death, can continue their grim game of trading away human life for money.“They named this legislation the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and as the tradition of this nation goes, any words they put into the name of a piece of legislation means the opposite,” said single-payer activist Margaret Flowers when I heard her and Helen Redmond dissect the legislation in Chicago at the Socialism 2010 Conference in June 2010.“It neither protects patients nor leads to affordable care.“This legislation moves us further in the direction of the commodification of health care,” Flowers went on:It requires people to purchase health insurance.It takes public dollars to subsidize the purchase of that private insurance.It not only forces people to purchase this private product, but uses public dollars and gives them directly to these corporations.In return, there are no caps on premiums.Insurance companies can continue to raise premiums.We estimate that because they are required to cover people with preexisting conditions, although we will see if this happens, they will argue that they will have to raise premiums.The legislation included a few tiny improvements used as bait to sell it to the public.The bill promises, for example, to expand community health centers and increase access to primary-care doctors.It allows children to stay on their parents’ plan until they turn twenty-six.It will include those with preexisting conditions in insurance plans, although Flowers warns that many technicalities and loopholes make it easy for insurance companies to drop patients.Most of the more than thirty million people currently without insurance, and the forty-five thousand who die each year because they lack medical care, essentially remain left out in the cold, and things will not get better for the rest of us.“We are still a nation full of health-care hostages,” Redmond said:We live in fear of losing our health care.Millions of people have lost their health care.We fear bankruptcy.The inability to pay medical bills is the number one cause of bankruptcy.We fear not being able to afford medications.Millions of people skip medications.They skip these medications to the detriment of their health.We are not free.And we won’t be free until health care is a human right, until health care is not tied to a job, because we still have an employmentbased system, and until health care has nothing to do with immigration status.We don’t care if you are documented or undocumented.It should not matter what your health-care status is, if you have a disease or you don’t.It should not matter how much money you have or don’t, because many of our programs are based on income eligibility rules.Until we abolish the private, for-profit health insurance industry in this county we are not free.Until we take the profit motive out of health care, we cannot live in the way we want to live.This legislation doesn’t do any of that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.Sullivan noticed a man with a T-shirt that read “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The shirt had Arabic and English script warning motorists not to come too close or risk being shot.The man, an Iraqi veteran, was putting on a pack and told us that he was the caretaker of a campsite.He said he left the Army a year ago, drifted, drank too much, and worked at a bar as a bouncer.His life was unraveling.He then answered an ad for a park caretaker.The clouds hovering on the peaks above us were an ominous gray.The caretaker said he planned to beat the rain back to the tent site.I thought of Earl Shaffer.“You try and forget the war but you carry pieces of it with you anyway,” the caretaker said.“In the mountains, at least, I can finally sleep.”Obama’s Health Care Bill Is Enough to Make You SickJULY 12, 2010A close reading of the new health-care legislation, which will conveniently take effect in 2014 after the next presidential election, is deeply depressing.The legislation not only mocks the lofty promises made by President Barack Obama, exposing most as lies, but sadly reconfirms that our nation is hostage to unchecked corporate greed and abuse.The simple truth, that single-payer, nonprofit health care for all Americans would dramatically reduce costs and save lives, that the for-profit health care system is the problem and must be destroyed, is censored out of the public debate by media that rely on these corporations as major advertisers and sponsors, as well as a morally bankrupt Democratic Party that is as bought off by corporations as the Republicans.The two-thousand-page piece of legislation, according to figures compiled by Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP), will leave at least twenty-three million people without insurance, a figure that translates into an estimated twenty-three thousand unnecessary deaths a year among people who cannot afford care.It will permit prices to climb so that many of us will soon be paying close to ten percent of our annual income to buy commercial health insurance, although this coverage will pay for only about seventy percent of our medical expenses.Those who become seriously ill, lose their incomes, and cannot pay skyrocketing premiums will be denied coverage.And at least $447 billion in taxpayer subsidies will now be handed to insurance firms.We will be forced by law to buy their defective products.There is no check in the new legislation to halt rising health-care costs.The elderly can be charged three times the rates provided to the young.Companies with predominantly female workforces can be charged higher gender-based rates.The dizzying array of technical loopholes in the bill—written in by armies of insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyists—means that these companies, which profit off human sickness, suffering, and death, can continue their grim game of trading away human life for money.“They named this legislation the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and as the tradition of this nation goes, any words they put into the name of a piece of legislation means the opposite,” said single-payer activist Margaret Flowers when I heard her and Helen Redmond dissect the legislation in Chicago at the Socialism 2010 Conference in June 2010.“It neither protects patients nor leads to affordable care.“This legislation moves us further in the direction of the commodification of health care,” Flowers went on:It requires people to purchase health insurance.It takes public dollars to subsidize the purchase of that private insurance.It not only forces people to purchase this private product, but uses public dollars and gives them directly to these corporations.In return, there are no caps on premiums.Insurance companies can continue to raise premiums.We estimate that because they are required to cover people with preexisting conditions, although we will see if this happens, they will argue that they will have to raise premiums.The legislation included a few tiny improvements used as bait to sell it to the public.The bill promises, for example, to expand community health centers and increase access to primary-care doctors.It allows children to stay on their parents’ plan until they turn twenty-six.It will include those with preexisting conditions in insurance plans, although Flowers warns that many technicalities and loopholes make it easy for insurance companies to drop patients.Most of the more than thirty million people currently without insurance, and the forty-five thousand who die each year because they lack medical care, essentially remain left out in the cold, and things will not get better for the rest of us.“We are still a nation full of health-care hostages,” Redmond said:We live in fear of losing our health care.Millions of people have lost their health care.We fear bankruptcy.The inability to pay medical bills is the number one cause of bankruptcy.We fear not being able to afford medications.Millions of people skip medications.They skip these medications to the detriment of their health.We are not free.And we won’t be free until health care is a human right, until health care is not tied to a job, because we still have an employmentbased system, and until health care has nothing to do with immigration status.We don’t care if you are documented or undocumented.It should not matter what your health-care status is, if you have a disease or you don’t.It should not matter how much money you have or don’t, because many of our programs are based on income eligibility rules.Until we abolish the private, for-profit health insurance industry in this county we are not free.Until we take the profit motive out of health care, we cannot live in the way we want to live.This legislation doesn’t do any of that [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]