All those that plan on leaving the United States now that Health Care Reform was passed by the Congress, might want to take a deep breathe and stop and think for a moment. Where are you going to go? Even Costa Rico has a universal health care system, as does Canada and all of Europe. You see, the USA was the last place a person living in a wealthy country could fail to get the treatment he or she needs because they had no money. This new system is not perfect, but neither was the first car or airplane, yet they were a start. It is about time we, as a nation, stopped playing Russian roulette with a family's financial security by seeing families lose everything because of a catastrophic illness. A country with a little compassion is a good thing. Unfortunately, the bill does not kick in for a few years, and for others it comes too late, but it is a new day, and there is reason to be hopeful that an additional twenty something million more people will have health care coverage. It has been a long time in coming, but history does not move very quickly.
Stay tuned.
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3 comments:
I just got through commenting about this very thing on another post - in doing so I found some clarity in what has been bothering me most about this whole thing - the 'Art' of compromise.
Any good idea that comes to the fore winds up, as it comes to a vote, significantly changed from whatever the original idea might have been. The 'Art' of compromise requires that the needs and views of competing and opposite positions wind up being reflected in whatever it is that comes to the floor for a vote. That is not necessarily a good thing.
Suppose, for a moment, that you need heart surgery to save your life. And you have two doctors who must agree on just what surgery gets to be performed. And those two doctors, both of whom claim to have your best interest at heart (no pun intended) are also interested in seeing the other doctor fail - or at least, to be portrayed in a bad light.
Do you want the surgery, in light of what you now know, to be the result of compromise between those two physicians?
Well, that's what we've got now.
We have a "Do Nothing" Doctor and a "Do Everything" doctor and the result is "Well, at least we did SOMETHING."
It's time for term limits in the House and Senate. It's time for the Career Politician to go the way of the dinosaur. It's time to send the lobbyists home. It's time to break the power of the Miltiary/Industrial/Political complex. It's time for Of the People, By the People, For the People to actually MEAN something.
I'm hoping the odds are in my favor that I'll live long enough to purchase good insurance. I've got pretty good genes and only have to make it, what, four years? I'll only be forty then. My alternative, if I got sick, was to commit a crime and get my treatment in prison... I could also get a break from the kids and take some classes while I'm there, right?
As soon as I heard it on the radio, I KNEW you were going to write about it today. Very well written post.
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