Single Payer Health Care

Go and read this article: This is what losing your kidneys looks like. I'll wait.

There has got to be an end to the stratification of health care in this country. Why are we willing to have people's very lives dictated by private insurers? Why are we willing to allocated medical care based on who has the most money, the best employer, or a spouse with a good insurance plan? Why are we willing to say to people trying to start businesses, "You must sacrifice your health, and that of anyone you employ, to succeed" because health insurance is too expensive for a bootstrap company?

Before the 1970s, health insurance was based on a mutual, or cooperative, basis. Profit was not permitted. It sorta worked. Once the profit motive came in, prices went up, oligopolies formed, denials increased, exclusions soared, and refusals to insure became so prevalent that it isn't even funny.

If you've ever had acne, asthma, depression, diabetes, cancer, or any of a huge list of ailments you can not get insurance for anything even remotely resembling a reasonable price, if at all. No one will write you a policy that doesn't exclude what you need it for the most!

The "insurance" model itself is faulty. Insurance is supposed to be a hedge against risk. Thing is, nearly everyone gets sick or injured at some point during their lives. The only variables are when, with what, and how often.

What is needed is health assurance - a pool of money that everyone pays into that covers their medical expenses, no "if's, "and"s, "but"s or exclusions. Whether a person gets a boil on their ass, or cancer of the colon, it should just be covered. The best way to do this is with a federal (large pool) single payer health care system.

I am very, very tired of seeing PayPal donation buttons for self employed friends, artists and musicians trying to pay for uninsured medical expenses. The risk nowadays to life and limb from working for yourself due to insurance conglomerate perfidy is unreal.

Please, Congress, for once do the right thing: Single Payer. No triggers (conditions are already met), no mandates (requiring people by law to "buy" private "for profit" health insurance), no half-assed "public option" plans that are designed to fail.

Corporations do not have a "right" to profit from people's misery, stress, pain and death. We the people do have a right to "Life, Liberty, and Pursuit of Happiness", and it's pretty hard to have any of those when you're dying from lack of money to pay doctors.