of health and gubmint

I’m depressed by the health care ‘debate’ taking place in the US.

Last night’s speech by Obama (which I didn’t watch, but of which I read a transcript and a handful of impressions) was largely what I expected from the US prez. Single-payer health care nixed, to the surprise of voters who obviously haven’t been paying a great deal of attention to what’s been coming out of the White House for the last few months. A proposed system of basically-what-we’ve-got-but-sorta-better that still relies on a private (if now more highly regulated and partially subsidized) insurance model. A lot of braying and shrieking from the idiot wing of an opposition party that apparently is still coming to terms with its growing obsolescence. Etc.

The plan seems to suck. That’s part of what’s causing me a bit of grief. Call it wild-eyed socialism (of the sort that’s… y’know, the baseline in pretty much every other major economy in the world), but medicine and the profit motive do not mix. I don’t intend to spend a lot of words explaining why, because this shit has been repeated ad nauseam, with examples from this country and that.

That, in fact, is what’s causing me some issues. I hate the Pocket Canadian brought out by shills to lie about how things work in my country. I hate that people, for however brief an instant, took Stephen Hawking’s hypothetical non-treatment as an example of why an NHS-style ’socialist’ system such as that of the UK is bound to murder America’s best and brightest (Hawking is, of course, a Briton, and as far as I’m aware, wasn’t ever sent off to the glue factory). I hate hearing otherwise sane people jabber on about Socialism and Capitalism and the There-Can-Be-Only-One battle between them, without having the first damn clue about what Socialism or Capitalism entails.

I hate, in short, watching what I’ve come to see as the core of America’s crisis of democracy: lies, shouts, bluster and more lies. My dad likes to point out that American media looks a great deal like the pre-Glasnost escapades of the Communist media in the Poland we left behind, and it’s true. How on earth can our southern neighbours make intelligent political decisions when they’re pelted with untruths at such pace that even politically sophisticated readers have trouble keeping up?

My best wishes. I do hope something good comes of all this, and if the current health care plan is less than stellar (and it is), may it at least be an improvement over the appalling mess of a system that allows something like 60% of personal bankruptcies to be the result of medical costs.

[Via http://marcinwrona.wordpress.com]