Let’s burn health insurance down. Greedy corporate bastards should burn. Big Pharma and big hospitals should probably burn too. You know who else is really, really, bad? Wall Street. Let’s burn the banks. And let’s burn Big Tech and the entire Silicon Valley cartel. Let’s also burn Big Agribusiness that’s making us fat and sick. And let’s burn the Oil companies that are destroying the planet, and let’s burn the automakers too. Heck, let’s burn all the globalist billionaires and while at it, let’s burn the White House. Let’s have a cathartic bonfire of all things we passionately hate.
The “scorched earth” military strategy was tried and found true time after time throughout recorded history. Unfortunately, the Geneva Convention banned this useful practice a few decades ago. Not to worry though, the aficionados of all burning things discovered a modern version of the same: the “scorched economy.” Like General Sherman marching resolutely to the sea, the warriors against all things evil are marching from election to election on what will hopefully soon be the ashes of the Great American Economy, and from those ashes the brotherly, egalitarian and perfect in every way, Phoenix shall rise. We simply cannot allow democracy to die in darkness. Hence, we will light the most magnificent bonfire the world has ever seen, and democracy will die in a glorious blaze second only to the Sun itself.
Health care is one-fifth of the American economy, and it is a highly combustible mixture of money, disease, pain, suffering, death, greed, lust, inequality, exploitation, theft, and even murder, along with every other sin known to mankind. It is a good place to start our illuminating destruction of evil. Health insurance companies cannot be allowed to exist. Pharmaceutical corporations must all die, and yes, hospitals should all be shuttered down. Heck, even doctors should be wiped off the face of the earth.
Our government, where we all come together to do good, should provide care to the sick, and preferably health to the healthy. Our government, by the people for the people, should invent new ways to prevent and cure disease. Health care should be given in the comfort of one’s home by artificially intelligent machines. Doctors and hospitals, like walls, are immoral 14th-century implements, that can be easily replaced by moral technology, such as drones, sensors and other electronic “things.” Once nobody gets paid to do health care, because government, and because, you know, “technology”, health care will obviously be free. Problem solved. Move on.
To paraphrase Susan Sontag (mostly because one cannot write anything today without some reference to the Third Reich), 10 percent of any population is irrational, no matter what, and 10 percent is rational, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction. In our case, the irrational 10 percent is alternately running for some elected office or serving on expert TV panels on everything, from fighting ISIS to fighting cancer, largely based on ability to quickly skim through Wikipedia articles. And when Medicare for all is deemed necessary to avert climate change, according to a recently introduced House resolution, one is forced to wonder if a Dodo Bird in Every Pot will be the winning electioneering slogan of our times.
Health care according to many well-intentioned people should be a “right.” Americans have many such rights enshrined in our Constitution, and the Right to health care seems to fit the bill. We have the Right to free speech for example. Is my right to free speech exercised the same as, say, Jeff Bezos’s right to free speech? We all have the right to assistance of counsel if accused of a crime. Is an assignment to a public defender, the same as being able to hire Alan Dershovitz? We have a right to not be assessed excessive bail. Do you have any idea how many people languish in jails for lack of $50 to post bail? Declaring health care to be a right is a cheap and very cruel form of demagoguery.
What if health care is not a Constitutional right, but just a right to a free public service, like say K-12 education? American public education has the largest cost per capita, middling outcomes, rampant systemic inequality, underqualified and underpaid teachers, and a constant stream of flailing Federal initiatives to have no child left behind. Lots of “tech” though, in every failing, illiterate classroom, and more added every day, except in the posh schools of the rich. That’s what a free public service looks like when the foundation is broken. There is little reason to believe that free public health care will be different, once the evil private sector goes up in flames.
Here’s an interesting thought. Would you be surprised to learn that employer-sponsored commercial health insurance is the most egalitarian health insurance system around? Do you know why? Because the “decision makers” are required to live within the decisions they make. Unlike salaries and taxation, when it comes to health insurance, the big powerful CEO gets the same exact plan that his secretary gets. Their interests are perfectly aligned in this case. Compare that to free public services, like health care and education, where decision-makers are in no way obligated to live inside the “comprehensive” solutions inflicted on everybody else. Think about that. There may be a clue here on how to go about fixing many things in this country.
Once you are safely in orbit around the Washington, DC swamp, you will never again have to send your children and grandchildren to a public school, never again have to shop for health insurance, never have to use public transportation, never have to worry about rent, utilities or anything else the “American people” worry about day and night. All the problems you pretend to solve are theoretical. Other people’s problems. Sure, you may be a very good person, genuinely wanting to bestow medical care on all Americans, but it’s not like your little kid is at risk of dying because you can’t afford an asthma inhaler. Theoretical problems tend to generate theoretical solutions. Theoretical solutions seldom work in practice.
Setting everything and everyone on fire and watching it all burn in a semi-religious exorcism of all that is and has been evil in America, is not the same as having your own plump derrière baptized by the flames. We who are about to be sacrificed in your self-aggrandizing arsonist rituals, categorically refuse to fuel the bonfires of your fake revolution.
Margalit Gur-Arie is founder, BizMed. She blogs at On Health Care Tech & Policy.
Image credit: Shutterstock.com
