Contradictions that Confuse

For years it’s been drummed into our heads that early detection of breast cancer increases the odds of survival, and advocates for health care reform have said they’re going to make screening exams a covered benefit.

Then a government picked panel of experts recommends women wait until they’re fifty to start getting mammograms for breast cancer screening. If mammograms aren’t covered, then a woman’s risk of dying from breast cancer increases. Given the evidence about stories of women who have survived breast cancer due to early detection, how could they possibly come out with something like this?

According to the government task force one in 1900 mammograms saves a life. If that one was you, all those mammograms would be worth it. Right? They’re just not worth it to the insurance company. To them we are premium paying consumers, not a human being whose life is worth 1900 mammograms. And the government agrees! Have Medical insurance company stocks gone up on the news that they’ll be saving five billion dollars a year for mammograms?

One excuse offered up by a doctor on the task force is that the message was misinterpreted. What they really mean is at age forty a woman should start talking to her doctor about obtaining mammograms. I rely on my physician to keep up with all the news in the world of medicine and to inform me as to the benefits or necessity of tests available to prevent early death. It is isn’t up to the patient to self-treat themselves or keep abreast of which screening tests we should be talking about.

It’s unethical and morally unjust that a ‘for profit’ company concerned with cutting costs as a corporate measure can have so much control over whether people live or die due to corporate profits.

We are the only ‘civilized’ country in the world that mixes & confuses corporate profits with an individuals life or death.

The blame can be laid on our reprehensible representatives in congress who cater to the bribes the health care lobbyists bestow into their re-election campaigns, instead of doing what they can for the voters health.　

We'll Never Know

Alexis De Toqueville wrote “in America there is a general distaste for accepting any man’s words as proof of anything".

Not so today, Glen Beck who started out as a stand up comedian, has many followers who praise his words as gospel truth.

James Madison said "A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both.”

A former managing director on Wall Street Nomi Prins said in the Nation magazine that we’ve given the sum of 17.5 trillion to banks in loans and guarantees to keep them afloat!

In just one of these programs the Treasury Secretary has set aside one trillion in the public private investment fund to entice billionaires to buy toxic assets (our homes) from banks. Are these and all the other ways we’re baling out banks popular on these news programs?

The farce is the orchestrated outrage over spending one trillion in ten years for health insurance and the tragedy is our silence when it comes to spending over 20 trillion for war, wall street and banks.

It’s all about marketing. TV talking heads are interested in grabbing as much market share to continue to rake in their millions, as opposed to obtaining popular information about our government. And thanks to these marketers we have gone from thinking citizens to mindless consumers.

Chalmers Johnson a former CIA analyst stated in 2007 that Americans do not know what is going on in their government; it’s too late, we’ll never know. 　

Circus Complex

The politicians are right in saying we facing complex issues. We face a medical / pharmaceutical /industrial complex with millions being paid to the very politicians who are turning their backs on the ‘will of the people‘, and we mustn’t forget the military industrial complex, which blatantly pushes for war in spite of the wishes of the majority.

When are the politicians going to grow a set and do what’s right for the general public instead of doing whatever they can for the bottom line of the medical; pharmaceutical and insurance megaliths.

The theatrics over the public option is scripted. Republicans say their lines and the Democrats say theirs. Neither side is addressing the real issue, which is corporate control, the real reason why so many Americans are uninsured and we’re bankrupt.

It’s all a dog and pony show, which complex is the pea under?

Having a majority in the House and Senate and the Executive branch, the Democrats could pass any solution they wanted, that is if they were actually motivated to find the solution.

The proposed legislation on “health care reform” will supposedly cost nine hundred billion over ten years.

Republicans are saying it’ll bankrupt us. Hello?? Who doesn’t know we’re already bankrupt.

Why don’t the Republicans come out and complain about the seventeen trillion we’re giving to the banks and wall street, or the three trillion Afghanistan will cost us? And that’s not counting the lives of American troops, and the uncountable enemy/civilian lives, nor the cost of Iraq which Bush never included in the budget.

Our government is a circus with the public option back in the center ring.