National Health Care

The wealth and power of any nation depends on the production that its citizens can create. One of the most important resources any nation will ever have therefore, is a healthy workforce. That resource is far too important to be left to commercial corporations who must, by their very structure, subordinate that national need to their own need for profit.

Commercial businesses operate on a short-term basis, usually from one quarter (a three month calendar period) to the next. Commercial health care corporations plan their services and operations based on that calendar system, because the well being of those corporations depend on their profit, and their sale of stock, but the health care of the nation is an on-going, long-term project requiring elaborate planning for events that will occur a generation or more into the future.

Our present system has already produced close to 50 million Americans who have no health insurance at all, perhaps 50 million more who are under-insured. Many Americans who do have health-care insurance they like, still depend on their employer to provide it and are dependent upon and bound to that company. They can’t quit their job, or look for another job or move because they may not be eligible for ANY health care if they give up their current plan. And since many American businesses also carry a portion of their employees health care costs they find themselves at a disadvantage when competing in the global economy with companies from other nations who do not carry these costs.

Will a governmental health care plan cause an increase in taxes? Probably. But America is currently paying - for its dangerously ineffective health insurance system - about twice as much as any other nation in the world and getting about half as much in return. Taxes may go up, but the price we are paying commercial insurance corporations may totally vanish! Not only will we become healthier, but we will have more money too. And even if we do pay additional taxes, we will get most of that back in care. And even if you or I do not need health care at all in any given period, we will all still realize benefits from having a healthier national workforce with more discretionary money to spend.

How do we implement this national health care? Begin with Medicare. Expand that to include ALL citizens. Phase it in over say, five years or even less. That will give us the strongest possible public option, we will then have a single-payer, single-collector system, and the prices will be set by health care providers and consumers working together under governmental regulations. Together we can improve this system as new opportunities become available. According to reliable polls the majority of American citizens want a single payer system with a strong public option, and most of the American health care providers want that system too. Medicare has been one of the most popular services our government has ever provided.

What would our founding fathers think? Well, remember they lived before the discovery of the germ theory of disease in a nation of less than four million people, aproximately 15% of which were slaves, and about half of which could not vote (because they were women), transportation depended on horses and the wind, communication was accomplished with quill pens, and the life expectancy of Americans was about 35 years. They designed a magnificant political structure for the world they lived in. We now live in a vastly different world. Hello?

Happy Veterans Day?

Once upon a summertime, some forty years ago, a playful picture was made of a man and his son fishing in the Gulf of Mexico. This seems a proper way to spend a day in the good ole summer time even though on the next Wednesday, this man left his children, his wife and his country. He left to return to Vietnam. His country needed him there. Again.

Someone gave me a card today. It said “Thanks for serving our country. Our veterans are our true heroes.” I didn’t know what to say. I was actually shocked. I wasn’t expecting it. I was kind of embarrassed. Such a thing had never happened before. The last time someone commented about my service to my country was when I returned from my second tour in Vietnam. A wealthy-looking guy in San Francisco airport, wearing a hound’s tooth cap with a red feather in it, spat in my face, and he got away. Next day two people got up and walked out of my church when I attended. One of them called me “Baby Killer!” The priest said I was a hero. I had eight days before I was to return to Vietnam for another tour. Since then there haven’t been any more comments. it has been a form of don’t ask - don’t tell. I don’t tell them I am a veteran and they don’t say anything nasty. It has worked out OK. I don’t need to say anything. Or do I? There are some issues. Here are just four of them.

1) Of those who saw combat in Vietnam, 85% later divorced, leaving their children to swim in uncertain waters and to change plans they had made all their lives.
2) That tonight, like every night, some 100,000 veterans are homeless. Spending the night in shelters, under bridges, on streets, in public parks.
3) That some 2,200 veterans died in 2009, as in every year, simply because they did not have access to health care - that’s six a day, one every four hours. Because they can’t get medical care in the country they served.
4) That in America, which has more people in prison and jail than any other nation in the world, one out of every seven inmates is a veteran.

Military service to one’s country can be fatal. Sometimes it leaves a person maimed or seriously injured. Injuries to the body can be understood by Americans, because they can see and react to that to a degree. Injuries to the mind and spirit and to the soul though, are to be hidden. When they become evident they are seen as a weakness in character beyond hope or care. They obviously can’t be helped, they don’t get better and may get a lot worse very quickly. The proper response seems to be punishment or isolation. And if those people will stay out of our way, and hide and say nothing, we will continue to ignore them and pretend they really don't exist. For one more day.

Happy Veterans Day.

Senator Robert Byrd

Any Requiem for Robert Byrd must include a dirge for his state.

Some comment seems appropriate as a person arrives at a remarkable achievement in our nation's records. Today Robert Byrd will have served his state longer than anyone else has ever served any other state. The people of West Virginia have elected and reelected him some 10 or 11 times either as a representative or senator, the last 56 years as senator. He’s not been around much lately because he is in poor health. So is his state.

Robert Byrd represents MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL. That’s a process in which mountain tops are scraped by vehicles the size of Delaware and pushed to uncover coal that lies under the ground. The tops then slide down into and fill up the valleys that used to carry streams through West Virginia. Byrd has been “unable” to prevent this. Not only that, but his people are still dependent on coal. Not the marketing of it or the selling of it but the other end of it, digging it out and breathing it in.

As Byrd completes his 56th year as their senator, the people of West Virginia rank among the highest in the nation in low life expectancy 46, high infant mortality 40, tooth loss 50, suicide 42, poor education 37 and mental health problems 50th. These are the people who continue to vote for him.

Is it fair to blame the condition of a state on its elected official? Why not? Particularly when they have been in office for 56 years. But I am not blaming Robert Byrd for all of his state’s problems. I am blaming the electorate.

Ft Hood, the Muslim and us, and Gods Galore.

There was a bad shooting on Fort Hood, Texas. Soldiers were killed by a gunman. That is not possible. How could such a thing happen on a military base? Then we find the killer was an officer. The impossible story just became totally unbelievable. More information tells us the kiiller was a MAJOR - a field-grade officer! Now we know this has to be a lie! But there is still more to come - we find out that he is also a medical doctor as well! NO- NO- NO- we can't believe that! And THEN we are told he is a psychairist! This is the craziest tale we have ever heard. Finally, word comes out that he is a Muslim. Oh Thank God!!! Now it all makes sense.

But there is still more . . . because as we learn about the killings and the prelude and the killer and the place and the emotions involved, we finally know that as a nation, that we are falling from the sky, slowly spinning down out of control. Nothing is planned anymore and then carried out, all is simply falling down to crash into the streets. Values are grimly abandoned, guns are grimly bought, hatred grimly simmers, vengence is now OURS dammit, too important to be left to some stupid lord to play around with. God can't begin to understand how MAD we have become. Allah has clearly become a pain in the rear, Yahweh revealed to be an raving child. ALL those Gods have to just cool it and go the hell away - at least for a while - when we get it straightened out then maybe, just maybe, we will give them another chance. Dammit, they just don't understand how MAD we have become!

Could it really be possible as some have already been so bold to say, that first man was created and then man created god in his own image? Are the Lord God, Allah and Yahweh only images graven in mankind's own petty likeness so he can bow down before his own imaginary creations and worship an exalted version of himself? Such a story would account for the world we have now created for ourselves, one in which we kill each other to honor, avenge and even just simply "please" our own separate gods.