As most of us know by now, healthcare in Massachusetts is currently in a state of crisis as legislators, frustrated with their inability to control private insurance premiums are involved in a standoff with private firms which have stopped writing new policies.
Fewer realize that Tennessee's Medicaid "TennCare", their "public option" for the poor, is also in the end stages of a private insurance-caused breakdown. 100,000 people have been dumped from the rolls, many making less than the poverty line.
The media line is that rising costs have made the state drop those 100,000 people. What the media don't tell us is that this situation is competely unnecessary, and in many ways, its artificially manufactured.
Ask any European how it works there. They pay far less. And they get all basic curative care. No surprises, no dumping when you get sick, no extortion. Even in the countries that have nonprofit sickness funds and a private model basic curative care, drugs needed to cure illness, as well as add ons like private rooms are so much more affordable that the difference is like night and day.
Ask them why. They will tell you that the United States government, wherever it buys health services, even with Medicare, pays too much, especially on drugs. And especially, so do our people. Almost ludicrously so. They will tell you our SYSTEM is sick.
Their politicians would never in a million years get away with doing what American politicians do, they will say.
Obama ran on the word "change" and the word "hope". But, do we see change? Do we have hope?
Honestly, no. What we do see is hype, denial and a media willingness to make up stories instead of report actual progress. Real debate never happened. It wont until we have real change. We are becoming a "Potemkin Nation".
The states, though, are trying to make the situation better for people. They are real people, dealing with real issues.
But, the states hands are tied on cost control for many reasons.. One of the biggest, perhaps the biggest is the fact that everything must occur alongside of the mandatory private insurers and their requirements. They must be kept on top, they must remain profitable. Even if 100,000 Americans die each year, they must not be asked to leave. (The states must also pay more because of "free trade"'s requirements, which I will get to in a bit.) Why?
Because its all part of THE GLOBAL MANUFACTURED SCARCITY AND FEAR AGENDA.
Thats a big issue and impossible to tackle in this diary, lets just start small.. and try to look at the situation with some clarity. A very large part of the reason we pay more is because the US government, for quite some time, has hamstrung change. And it continues.
Many (Almost all?) of the dozens of ways that other nations routinely practice cost control, are being BLOCKED - making "our" system - BY DESIGN so inefficient that the majority of us cannot afford acceptable healthcare! And its not just us who are so "blessed" our government is trying to impose this mess on others as well. Through "free trade".
But back to the US. How many of us can't afford unsubsidized health insurance under the brain dead model? Four fifths of us, actually. 80%.
That isn't changing or getting better, its getting worse. Many states have high risk pools, right? Well, those high risk pools need to be subsizized at around 50% or they become SO expensive that NOBODY can afford them. And they are falling left and right. Many of those on Medicaid could probably work IF THEY HAD INSURANCE AND DECENT MEDICAL CARE. If they were in Canada, they would be managing. But, here, because they can't get insurance, they cannot get work that would enable them to live a normal life. Instead they must impoverish themselves, spend everything they own, and then apply for Medicaid. They are being artificially removed from the labor pool by a policy that is designed to do so.
The same thing with older Americans. There is no logical reason for this policy.
But the worst is the requirement that the world revolve around the private insurance model that everybody knows is destroying this nation's future.
In the states cases they are being buried with costs because of their programs' need to remain 'options', never having the kind of risk pool that is needed to make healthcare affordable for large groups.. Why? because that would require replacing the insurance monster and its 50% waste. Because that would require allowing everybody to get good care, not excluding the people who need it, when they need it.
Europeans think we are crazy. Because this isn't rocket science.
Thats why EVERY Dutch citizen, of any age and health status, pays $160 a month (out of their taxes) for excellent healthcare that an American would be lucky to get for TEN TIMES THAT.
Its a system only corporations could love. And they do, BECAUSE THEY WROTE IT.
By "our" government agreeing to screw us, by its agreeing to never mandate prices down by acting as the single payer and buyer, then passing on the savings- because of big medical cost drivers like drugs we all lose. In fact, its not only us. when other countries do that, the United States tries to stop it. (Despite states protests!)
Although Massachusetts's state healthcare program and Tennessee's TennCare have many differences, both programs are struggling with the same problem, that of affordability in a situation where the state must pay private providers and cannot address their fixing of prices, as well as pay inflated prices for drugs that are as much as four times the typical price in developed nations. This ties their hands and makes affordable healthcare programs like many other nations have impossible.
What is going on? A lot, and much of it is not being discussed with Americans because we are ON THE TABLE, not at it.
The election was "won" by healthcare promises that cannot be pursued without changes in WTO treaty obligations, changes that it is highly doubtful the Obama administration would ever pursue. The American people and honesty, an afterthought. A classic bait and switch.
To keep their corporate profits high and their chances for foreign markets good, affordable healthcare must not be allowed to gain a foothold here, in the last domino. (or the first domino, if you look at the WTO's plan as global privatization and destruction of public healthcare systems in the other nations, a view that they, and our own government, internally, seem to share.) and satisfy their global pretensions, it appears the insurance companies have already defeated the chances for health reform in the United States. They could not allow anything else to have happened and keep the inertia going against healthcare as a human right, and towards global privatization. With free trade treaties like the GATS as a one way street to privatization.
They control the media framing of this issue, they wrote the Senate bill, and increasingly paid bloggers manipulate the blogosphere, drowning dissenting voices out.
Democracy is under attack by "free trade" treaties like GATS that enlist politicians in fast track negotiations that they need not even explain to the American people, who without access to public healthcare and not knowing why, are becoming increasingly indebted and enslaved. GATS could even bar the modest, but much hyped "protections" in health reform as barriers to free trade. (In fact, that is a very likely scenario.)
Can we hope for a better outcome in 2012? 2016? 2020? 2024? Will our nation survive? Not if American jobs and votes no longer matter except as tools to be manipulated every four years and soaked for ever increasing amounts of money.
Lobbying by export oriented US businesses like the drug industry are a big part of the problem. The free trade agreements are at their cores, designed to subvert democracy, and clearly, they have already succeeded.
On healthcare, the average American over his or her lifetime can expect to be drained of a QUARTER MILLION DOLLARS that they would not have to pay in Canada (Canada has 1% higher taxes than the US)
We could still have affordable healthcare, but we would need to act soon, and make it completely free, like Canada's, because the only way that will stand up to GATS is a complete de-commercialization of healthcare, removing money from the equation entirely.
Otherwise, like it has with South Africa, the General Agreement on Trade in Services could tie our hands, effectively holding Americans hostage as a bargaining chip, to be traded access to. (Essentially, 'pimped out'- US drug, insurance, and hospital service companies can only enter profitable unregulated "emerging markets" by using "access to" profitable captive US customers as an exchange good.)
By forcing healthcare into an affordability crisis - they make steps towards lessening US labor's ability to successfully resist the mass importation of low cost medical workers and ultimately, destroy US unions with workers imported through GATS mode four. Also, with bad healthcare - few US workers receive care for work related medical conditions when they could be identified as work-related, saving money on disability claims. Ultimately, the disabled could also be globalized, their care offshored, becoming a profitable target for politician kickbacks.
Public healthcare is just too damn efficient! Where's the profit to be skimmed from that?
Shorter term, using US markets as bait, multinationals- corporate megacompanies can negotiate higher prices globally for their drugs and services in exchange for giving overseas companies access to "their" market.
Does that money come back to Main Street to compensate Americans for the quarter million dollar lifetime hit each of us must take in comparison to a Canadian who enjoys quality, affordable health care? Obviously, No.
Also you wont see Barack Obama discussing the GATS or the WTO with most of us.. although he clearly is involved with these issues. No, you'll just see him making promises he could not have ever kept. He doesn't want to be honest about the future, because there is still time to change it. But not for long.. And people have to SCREAM BLODDY MURDER, not meekly queue for the slaughter.
For example, jobs are vanishing. For good. We need to fight to save every godo job we can, because in twenty years, there will be practically no unskilled jobs at all.
We need to recognize bullshit when we see it. Nothing comes for nothing. But that is what they want to spend. And they want to keep exporting your jobs. Because ITS SO PROFITABLE.
Take "green jobs". When "green jobs" were promoted as an electoral ploy (Implied, but not stated outright they were represented, most feel, as a way to get increasingly unskilled US workers real jobs without costly, time consuming education-) it seemed to be an implicit promise that green job grants would go to create American jobs. HOWEVER, as subsidies that are limited to a nations domestic firms only are WTO-illegal, 79% of a recent grant program's funds went overseas!
From: Green Job Offshoring Reignites Buy America Debate
"Last month, an American University think tankmade this startling conclusion: 79 percent of the $2 billion in clean energy grants under a U.S. Treasury/ Energy Department stimulus initiative have gone to foreign - not U.S. - companies. By industry estimates, the program has lead to well over a thousand net job losses in manufacturing.
While President Obama ran and won(and has since advocated) a green industry agenda that creates jobs in the U.S., the AU report finds that the Energy Secretary and American Wind Energy Association stating for the record that the grant program did not have immediate U.S. manufacturing job creation as a major goal."
Get the picture? We desperately need honesty and we are getting lies.
Lots of lies.