Propaganda of the Absurd

Health care hypocrisies abound which any reasonable person could dispute.

People oppose health insurance reform because the government will kill the elderly. Concern about killing the elderly would have more validity if we weren’t already killing the young in Iraq and Afghanistan. Where’s the raucous debate or concern over that?

Besides, health insurance companies are already killing people by refusing to refer patients to see doctors other than their primary care physician or their refusal to pay for cancer medication saying it’s not medically necessary.

Another misguided protest slogan is that free markets work best in health insurance. In the health insurance world it’s not a free market. The insurance companies decide how much a procedure, test or office visit is worth. They reimburse at the rates they want to pay. How is that a free market? Can we pay our own allowed rates for food, gas, insurance, utilities and mortgages? That’s out of the question because insurance corporations control the media and delude people into thinking health insurance reform means the free market is under attack. Hardly, the free market has already been attacked by CEO’s like Cigna’s CEO who rakes in eleven million a year.

There’s nothing wrong with making a profit. But making exorbitant profits at the expense of the suffering of others is unconscionable and un-ethical.

Another easily refutable slogan is saying health insurance reform will bankrupt us, we’re already bankrupt. Add up the seven hundred billion we gave to Wall Street and the nine hundred forty seven we’ve given to war, that’s almost equal to this year’s deficit or a trillion dollars over ten years for health insurance reform.

Saying that all these Town Hall Meetings is democracy in action is absurd. It’s the machinations of insurance companies working through former politicians like Richard Armey and his organization FreedomWorks instigating these dog and pony shows. People voicing their opposition to health insurance reform are repeating whey they hear from TV clowns, who get paid millions, to repeat to the public what the corporations want us to hear. If anything, these Town Hall meetings prove that the American people are determined to keep the insurance corporations in control.

And the public option plan that is everyone is so worried about, well not to worry. This public plan won’t be socialist but fascist. After the federal government mandates that all citizens have health insurance like the insurance companies want, the public option plan will be a pool of private insurance companies from which people will choose, essentially pouring more of our tax dollars into the pockets of private insurance companies.

Who’s in control? In the end we’ll get a few bones thrown our way like the elimination of a maximum an insurance company will pay in a lifetime, caps on out of pocket expenses and maybe even a cap on how much insurance companies can raise yearly premiums, but control will remain in the hands of the few, the insurance companies.