Foolin’ the People About America. Better Off Than Fifty Years Ago? Part Three: Starving the “Beast”
Your Medical Payment or Your Life
What else is different now than fifty years ago? Well, there’s people who can’t pay for health care… can’t get health care? …. Now that’s something new for me too. Can’t get health care. Wow. You mean you’re sick, you’re gonna die, but you can’t get help in the medical system? Unbelievable. That used to be unheard of.
I know. You’re thinking, “But we passed universal health care in recent years.” Remember though, we passed universal health care “coverage” … not care. Everyone has to be insured does not mean everyone gets taken care of.
At any rate, none of this “universal health care” has “trickled down” to the very needy as far as I can tell. Now, I don’t know if folks are being turned away from hospitals like they were before it was passed. Folks got refused care for lack of coverage in recent decades. And sometimes they died. (I wonder how many others died while struggling to fill out the forms to apply for health care for the needy? *sarcasm*)
Regardless, health care that is delayed, rationed out, or cut back and denied for certain conditions can be just as much a death sentence as being turned away at a hospital door. Example? After we passed 
“universal” coverage Governor Jane Brewer of Arizona allowed a change in policy in their state-funded health care to deny organ transplants to those folks who could not afford it otherwise. These were organ transplants needed to save their lives. 
These people would have received them under some other coverage, but falling through the cracks and being poor—some of them born too disabled to be able to work at a job—they were essentially told, “We can’t afford to keep you alive (we’ve got tax cuts for the rich to pay for).” So they did. They died. Republicans clamored about “death panels” beforehand; then promptly implemented one as soon as they could.
Isn’t this the kind of health care the opponents of “socialized medicine” say we would get if we went to single-payer? Well, we’ve got it folks—delays, rationing, denials, complications … and stress!—without any of the benefits of “socialized medicine.” I’ve watched it take two weeks to get a prescription in Riverside County, California, when it should have taken 45 minutes or less. The folks there handling health care for people who include poor folks on Medi-Cal are so overworked and stretched thin that you need to stand in line, literally stand in line for sometimes four hours or more to get a prescription filled. Think I’m exaggerating? I’m aware of at least one elderly gentleman who collapsed while waiting and was removed on a stretcher. I felt like I was in a scene from the movie Soylent Green, wondering where they were taking this one who had fallen by the wayside.
And the answer is no. No to the other question in your mind: “Don’t they have places you can sit down?” I know of no other place where you have to stand to get your prescription, you’re REQUIRED to stand. But then this is a huge county hospital catering to the poor. It handles many poor people…and it does it poorly. The unwritten rule is, “You’re asking for health care at a discount!? Well, WE’LL MAKE YOU PAY…ONE WAY OR THE OTHER, DAMN YOU!”
Starve the “Beast”
You don’t think this attitude trickles down to the masses from policy on high? Well, you tell me what the policy makers of the 1% are thinking when they say they are going to “starve the beast” of government … continually cut back funds for government services…as a back door way of making government smaller. This is the exact wording they have used, since Reagan, for their policies of tax cuts for the rich that require massive spending cuts on services for poor and middle income folks.
But think now: Just who do they imagine is really that “beast”? And why use the word, “starve”? Yes, the “beast” of the masses, the riff-raff, is being “starved”—being made to suffer for lack of sufficient money for systems and workers so folks can be served faster. With money stretched thin for humane processing systems and employees to implement them, people are refuse…”beasts”…having to stand and suffer.
I wonder how this is not simply a more undetectable way of eliminating in America the handicapped, disabled, and/or mentally challenged than the way the Nazis did it to the same sort of “riff raff” when they got to power during the time of the Third Reich.
Continue with Universal Health Care in America? Don’t Make Me Laugh…. You Get an “Assumed Doctor” and Like it or You Choose to Die.
Return to Starving for Prosperity: Foolin’ the People About America…Better Off Than Fifty Years Ago? Part 2
The Rise and Fall of “Obvious Truths,” Part Three – an Audio Reading by SillyMickel Adzema
Here is an audio of the author’s impassioned reading of this part. Though it is of the first, unedited and unpolished version, and it does not contain all the detail of its current form below, it does capture the flavor of it all. I offer it here for your listening pleasure. For the reading of this part, “The Rise and Fall of ‘Obvious Truths,’ Part Three,” click on the link to the audio site above or click the link to the audio player below.
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player.swf?1305835355
Continue with Universal Health Care in America? Don’t Make Me Laugh… You Get an “Assumed Doctor” and Like it or You Choose to Die.
Return to Starving for Prosperity: Foolin’ the People About America…Better Off Than Fifty Years Ago? Part 2
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Culture War, Class War 
#1 by Al Kovnat on April 17, 2012 - 9:42 am
The wealth of america has sold the american people on selfishness and cruelty towards the disadvantaged. To have people die because of lack of funds for health care seems to be collateral damage to the people who do not want their tax money going towards others. There is no charity and no goodness in the american culture right now and the whole world is watching. We don`t get the right information because the media is owned and controlled by these same corporates that sold many of us the concept of greed. I`m sure that the majority of americans are good and decent, but they must get their heads out of the sand and wake up so we don`t go down as the new anti humans of the world.
#2 by sillymickel on April 17, 2012 - 8:42 pm
Good points with which I wholeheartedly agree and a valuable way of looking at this whole issue. Thanks for your input on the article, Al
#3 by Bobbie Dunn on April 18, 2012 - 9:36 am
Michael, I agree with you on this one. I would never be an organ donor in the US because they may not revive me in the ER just to get my organs. Universal Healthcare is something that happens in Europe and the people here in Germany just don’t understand how 40,000 people die each year in America SIMPLY because they do not have healthcare coverage. They also do not understand why or how that mentally ill or disabled people are sitting on the curbsides of America like so much Garbage. Hitler and the Nazis did exactly the same thing: Marginalizing women as breeders, criminalizing certain religious groups and races and homosexuals and disabled people. YOU ARE RIGHT!
#4 by sillymickel on April 18, 2012 - 9:42 am
an informed and informative comment. very interesting however bleak. …and you say it so eye-poppingly well.
And “marginalizing women as breeders” … yes! That’s something I’ve been thinking about and will be writing about. For isn’t this whole anti-abortion thing from the RW geared to keep women essentially “barefoot and pregnant”!? Keep the people burdened enough, they will never rise up in complaint.
thank you very much for your comment, Bobbie.
#5 by sillymickel on April 18, 2012 - 5:20 pm
Theresa Edelman writes –
Since I have no knowledge of the way it was 50 years ago, I can only comment from my own experience. I know a geriatrician. He’s an excellent Dr that avoided the draft by going to Belgium for medical school. He had to take his first year twice because he didn’t speak French and had to learn and understand his medical textbooks. He HATES being a Dr now! The reason is the insurance companies actually force additional tests on his patients before he can order the one test he knows will give them the answer he needs. Many of them end up worn out or dead before they get around to that one test that his years of experience as a Geriatrician make him know is really the only one they need! So, besides the system wearing out his patients with tests they didn’t need, the system is wearing out a lot of really good physicians who are loosing their patience with the endless hoops insurance companies have put in front of him.
#6 by sillymickel on April 18, 2012 - 5:22 pm
important points, Theresa. In fact, I have more on what our system does to the doctors coming up also. thank you for commenting.