INSURANCE REFORM VS. HEALTH REFORM

I feel intense disappointment in Senators Bennett and Hatch for using scare tactics to justify no medical insurance reform. I wish they and the rest of the Republican establishment would behave honestly and tell us to our faces that the Republicans believe only people with money deserve to have good health and access to the American system of medicine.

Of course, our Senators have plenty of company in the Congress. These days, health care reform discussions illustrate Congress’s preference to appear to be doing something as opposed to actually doing something. Its behavior wears thin in this time of crisis.

The debate on health care reform has generated all sorts of oddities. For a start, I find it unacceptable that few -- if any -- people publicly discuss how much profit insurance companies should make – or even if they should make a profit at all. This basic assumption remains crucial to the debate.

Furthermore, many citizens, politicians, and policy experts obsess over the issue of whether private insurance funds or a public one-payer system should pay for the medical system. Yet hardly anyone discusses what governments should do to promote good health.

We will get reforms only when we citizens and our Congressional representatives get serious about the scope and nature of reform. For example, we should stop allowing farmers to grow tobacco, the ingredients of alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana. If we could reduce if not eliminate the number of people who use these dangerous and unhealthy substances to their detriment, that will reduce medical costs of these substances’ wide-spread bad effects.

Let us look at this issue in a way that will become more important as the planet gets more overpopulated. How long should starving people tolerate the growth of tobacco, alcohol, cocaine, and marijuana on properties that could grow more food? How long will the starving poor put up with the excuse that the needs of moneyed addicts for tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine take precedent over the needs of the poor for food?

This editorial feels a little scattered even to me.


Therefore, let me conclude with my three calls to action.

1) We should promote healthy practices first.

2) Congress should rise to the occasion and set up a one-payer system that will helps pay medical bills. It should set up that system independent of employers. We should unlink finally employment and health benefits.

3) We should not tolerate the growth and use of tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine, for they increase the costs of both illness and health.