Insure My Ass
(Business • Government)
Various components of the insurance industry have been bleeding me for decades. Nothing in which I can sit and also aspire to own is free from a veneer of insurance, least of all my own skin. Essentially by spreading their bribes around over the years, the industry has ratcheted down regulations and laws to the point that I can’t spit in my own back yard without carrying a salivation policy. And if I spit twice, my neighbor is required to get flood insurance.
I’ve heard many call it a necessary evil, but can’t help questioning the necessity. It seems to me that in essence, insurance is a hedge against God’s temporary disfavor. That in itself provides a clue with whom you are dealing. How smart is it, really, to insure yourself to the point you can be Smitten by your Maker and just shrug it off as a chaotic mathematical inconvenience? How far can Fate be bent before the fabric of the universe is rent?
Which brings me to the congressional attempt to modify the current American health care system of either sending insurance companies $2 in advance for every $1 you think you might have to give to a doctor after first paying off your $3,000 deductible and using all the expired antibiotics you horded from last winter, or waiting for six hours in the Oxbow County Public Poverty Hospital emergency humiliation room to get your arthritis prescription renewed.
As I have watched this drama unfold over the past several months, I have repeatedly found myself compelled to ask the same question: Why is everyone pretending that there is any difference at all between the insurance industry and congressional Republicans? The insurance industry and the congressional Republicans (with the exception of Olympia Snowe but with the addition of Joe Lieberman) both (all) utter the same lying public statements about what “insurance reform” will mean, what percentage of senior citizens will be asphyxiated and barbecued and how many of our children will have to be sold into servitude to major retail outlets in order to buy coverage under the new and as-yet largely undefined reform plan.
The Republican Party and the insurance industry lobbyists even quote the same “non-partisan” (insurance-company-owned) research institutes. And when they quote them, the Republican Party and the insurance industry lobbyists even use the same nouns, adjectives and verbs strung into the same sentences. They are on the same page, joined at the wallet.
Other than the independently wealthy, I don’t think any honest American possessed of a fully functional brain believes the current health care system is not in need of serious reform. Everyone agrees that insurance middlemen obtain too many of the dollars flowing through the system, in return for far too little value.
Apparently there is some disagreement over whether every human deserves to be able to see a doctor when they are sick, though. Most congressional Republicans and, of course, the insurance companies, seem content to allow all retail employees, lawn-care company workers, roofing crews, migrant farm workers, journalists, union members, artists and unemployed people to obtain health care over at the Oxbow County Public Poverty Hospital emergency humiliation room.
For those of you who just like to cut to the bottom line, here it is, (and I apologize in advance if this is too blunt for your sensibilities, but this is my opinion and if I can’t say it on my own blog than what the fuck?):
The insurance industry has bribed itself deep into the wallet of every American who has one, and has created a system where it does not have to risk insuring the poorest and sickest members of our society. And now that their money spigot is being threatened, they are spending their largess on an ad campaign full of big honkin’ lies. And, of course, on congressional Republicans like the one in my district, who see more opportunity in taking bribes from the insurance industry and race-baiting the lunatic fringe than in attempting to do the right thing for all of their constituents, not just the richest, whitest ones. Congressional Republicans have come out of the closet and put their personal fortunes and their political affiliation before America.
Really, this should be the greatest moment ever in the history of the Libertarian Party.
→ B.Dunn, Oct 14, 2009, 04 08 am
