Private Insurance, even with exchanges, will Never Work. Some Things, like Rights, are too important to integrate profit motives.
On the right basically since I was born the argument has been that market competition is the means to creating the best product. I think that’s true – for products. It’s not true when it comes to people.
If you want to build a better TV, toast to the free market. If you want to make people really wealthy, toast to unrestricted free markets. But if you want to take care of you and your family, then profit needs to be as far away as possible from the system. If you want to make sure that people don’t go around killing each other, profit ought not be factor in the discussion process. Heck, if you want to build the most powerful military on the planet, profit gets in the way of that, too (imagine if the military had to always find the best deal on wrenches or toilet seats? All that weapons development the US is so proud of would never have made it beyond the single engine bi-plane.)
The United States spends more money per capita than any other nation. Now, those defending privatization of all health care will shout from rooftops and into microphones that the system in the US is the best… no. Health Care in the US costs over twice as much as some countries, yet we have shorter life expectancy and higher infant death rates.
In the US, our babies die more and adults die earlier because of our health care system than other western nations. The US is “powerful”, sure – but there are major metrics that are going down, no matter how you look at them. And if the county keeps cutting education while college tuition keeps rising… who do you think is going to have the knowledge and skills to create all these amazing companies that drive our economy?
Anyone?
But back to health care and the ACA and “Obamacare”.
There are fundamental ideas, services, and rights that would never, and will never be fully realized when they are privatized and therefore subject to the bottom line, shareholders, and Mitt Romney, Bain Capital like investment firms.
In the Bain Capital vein: no one has ever denied that Bain Capital has made boat loads of money for people from both helping to create successful businesses (like Staples), AND it creates deals through which they earn massive returns for investors on closing down, bankrupting, and selling off businesses. It’s all legal, and it’s all acceptable in what we’ve decided how capitalism works and what’s acceptable insofar as making deals, right?
I, however, choose to work with companies that exclusively try to create things… not pick and choose between create and destroy based on which option gets a better profit.
Now that the country as a whole is learning a little more about what private equity and investment firms like Bain Capital actually do…. it’s time the country take that new insight and apply it to all those things we think that make the United States a great county. Is it really a good idea to gamble on things like our nation’s health care? Even WITH Obamacare, we’re nowhere near as advanced in our thinking as the rest of the industrialized world. Fox News and all the whacky right-wing radio hosts can bastardize Western Europe and Canada all they want, but facts are facts: their systems are better. They know, unlike our business-money-driven minds here in America, that health is not a matter of profit.
Those countries take care of their people…. what a novel concept. And here we are, “The most powerful nation in the world” (which is debatable now), and this wonderful country refuses to do something as basic as take care of its own people.
A country doesn’t exist without its people and its people do not co-exist without their country. No matter how much Republicans preach, we need our Federal Government to literally create and maintain the society in which live. Yes, states should also have autonomy, but there are many, many… countless things states cannot do on their own. Like a massive military, for instance, or paying for all of the research and development that has saved hundreds of thousands of lives and literally helped create our culture: food to pharmaceuticals, stem cell research to the NEA – even those darn drones.
Society… *real* Society: our culture, our rights, our freedoms and quirks that make a people a country… Society does not and will never survive when profit is the primary motivator. Capitalism can do just fine, but when it… when PROFIT becomes more important than our society (a country’s people and culture)… then we have a real problem.
Obamacare isn’t enough. Until profit is removed as part of the equation the services will always be second rate, and we will always have people uninsured.
