That Evil Socialist Healthcare Bill was Passed (an old rant from 2009 or 2010)

(An old rant, from ca. Spring, 2010) 

The Healthcare Bill - it's crappy enough, yes. I'm trying to figure this all out. If you hate Liberals, don't read the rest of this....

Re the Bill itself - we do have Market Forces to thank for it. Because a "free market" medical insurance and medical product environment has repeatedly been run as a business rather than as the medical service it exists to be, and so there was a need to do SOMETHING. While this big medical aggregate (a) tried to show a bright Corporate face, on one hand, on the other (b) it obstructed and denied coverage to its clients on a regular basis; while it (a) kept pumping up drug & medical services consumption and demand, it (d) simultaneously kept its prices as high as possible. In other words, it operated to make corporations and their higher-ups rich while becoming simultaneously less and less affordable to the rest of us - to the point where without "medical insurance", we couldn't even be treated.

Medical services should - really - start in the home. Hygeine; 911; stopping bleeding; eating real food instead of what's marketed; eating less (since we work less); and so on.  But there relatively fewer and fewer homes as years go by.  It often seems that only the rich and the simple even have homes, to speak of; the rest of the nation lives as a bunch of greedy mono-souls: "Hooray for me and to Hell with thee" is the modern motto, it often seems.  And yet crazy homeless wildlings shouldn't be denied medical help just because they don't have a stable and moderate way of life. Everyone should be able to get at least a basic bit of health care.

Where has the old 'middle-class' gone to? Now that the easy wave of American Prosperity is over, they have either moved up into the Rich, or fallen to wayside and become Poor. The USA needs to decide if it still wants to preserve a middle class at all, or just devolve into a Hong Kong sort of setup.

What the US really needs is this (so I think):
- The American people as a whole need to accept that people do get sick and die; as it is, no one seems to accept that death is a part of life, and we blame the doctors and the medical system for our lack of invulnerability and immortality;
- A Basic Local Care revolution - barefoot doctors, as it were, for the greater part of the USA, and not just a few super-high-tech medical centers; but if we leave it to 'the market', God only knows what that would bring! This needs to be a decently Regulated program, whether local or national.
- An interface of both Basic Local Care and Professional and High-Tech Centers: we need both, we need a balance. But since regular medical services are disappearing, merging into fewer and fewer single large centers, the AVAILABILITY of nearby medical care decreases. The model should be - illness, see the Local; serious illness, see the Professional; really serious illness, see the Medical Center.
- Responsibility on the part of the people RECEIVING medical care: stay clean, eat better, don't play with guns and STOP CHEATING and faking when you don't have medical coverage;
- Better still, we need a Universal Health Care system, so that oafs don't HAVE to cheat all the time to get care.  In other words, as long as the Market denies people health care, they will certainly cheat and not pay bills in order to get it.

So, instead of a 2,400-page document, we need a short, clear guide, a Medical Manifesto that mandates expanding basic care; requires education of the dolts who need usually need it so that they can take care of themselves (or actually be liable to blame for not doing so); that integrates the Local Basic Care providers in a simple & effective way with the medical upper echelons - the more expensive Professional Medical providers, and then beyond that the ultra-expensive Centralized Highest-Tech systems.

All that aside, I'm still trying to find out how the Obama & Pelosi-led Medical legislation will work, in point of fact.  If it survives the attacks from the Right.