Politics: HealthCare
First, read these two posts by Jay Lake.
More on the weird billing, and costs of healthcare
Just to be clear: He has insurance. And is probably going to be driven penniless by the cost of his treatment. Got that? Okay… now my opinion.
The entire health care issue, in my overly something opinion, can boil down to this: is every human life worth fighting for, to the bitter end… or do we value some lives over others, value some lives longer than others?
And by we, I mean literally we, we the people, the ones who live and breathe and suffer and die. All of us.
Do we value life so much that we will pay for radical treatments, experimental drugs (and the research that goes before), and optional surgeries? Or do we think that some lives are worth more than others?
This has all sorts of implications from abortion policies to euthanasia. Too many implications for my mind to do more than boggle over right now.
If some lives are worth more, how do we sort it out? Who is worth more? Why? Maybe the ability to pay for insurance IS our sorting mechanism.
If that is the case, the current state of insurance seems to me to indicate that the most valuable lives are the ones that are HEALTHY and insured (i.e. paying into the system.)
That strikes me as a really piss poor way of choosing who is valuable enough to save.
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On a different angle, the idea that public for-profit companies run health care insurance is foolish. The goals and mottoes of the company and customers are in direct conflict with each other. The company’s goal is to increase profit. Which simply means taking in more money while paying out less. The customer’s goal is to pay a small amount frequently so that in the event of a situation (or emergency) there is not a large amount to pay out.
Okay, that’s probably not quite accurate. The customer really wants to put in a little bit frequently in order to stay healthy. The customer doesn’t really want insurance so much as steady and covered care. If the ends to the means is through insurance, so be it.
I spent years buying into the idea that the government was the scary evil thing. Since the government is people and we are the people, well, it is still a scary thing. Scary and stupid rather than scary and evil. But now I’m buying into the idea that corporations are evil. When the ultimate goal, for which everything else is sacrificial, is to increase profit every quarter, then there is NO ROOM FOR GOOD. In the same way that the absence of light is dark, the absence of good is evil.
So yeah, I trust the tea party idiots more than I trust any insurance company. And those tea party yipyaps probably want to kill me because I LOOK different.