Love in the midst of greed

Having now viewed SiCKO, I am tempted to throw up my hands in disgust, and throw in the towel in defeat.

However, the love I felt for each of the victims in that movie, and the love I feel for the millions more that they represent, gives me no option but to press on in the face of greed and utter disrespect for fellow humans.

Let me say this - our notion that we need to simply insure the un-insured needs to be examined and re-examined, and then examined some more.

Do we mean to say that these folks are the "problem" with our health system, and therefore should be the target of our proposed solution?

Do we mean to say that these "poor, un-responsible folks who don't value their health and therefore choose not to have health insurance" are the ones to be fixed?

It sounds silly, but think about the logic - you fix what it broken, and attack what is the source of the problem.

I hear no one positing that maybe what we need to voting on in 2008 is a more genuine plan of fixing the larger system that creates, as one of many symptoms of its disease, the millions who are uninsured and underinsured.

That system, my friends, is called "unchecked profit motives running a health care system"

The medical analogy for this is a blood infection, also known as sepsis. Now, this life threatening condition has many symptoms, such as high fever. A very junior medical student might think that Tylenol would be arrented to attack the symptom of fever, but we all know that this is a ridiculous way to treat sepsis, one which will only worsen the problem.

In our current "progressive", "liberated" debate on healthcare, pushed as a way to appeal to voters, and appease the Big Business interests funding the campaigns, we are throwing Tylenol at a life threatening condition, treating the symptom of fever instead of focusing on the cause of the fever, the "microbes" of the for-profit machine (Insurance and Drug companies to name a few of the biggest perpetrators)....under we get serious about treating the disease, and not a symptom of the disease, we are only postponing the continued demise of treating humans as humans and health as a human right.

In love,
Anthony