An American Way of Death

Healthcare is not really heath care, is it? It is actually sickness maintenance. It’s theoretically about providing resources for sickness: Drugs, medical devices, doctors and nurses. You only need those things when you’re sick. If you actually wanted to ensure people’s health you would make sure they did healthy things, like breathe fresh unpolluted air, drink fresh unpolluted water, eat organic carcinogen free foods. You’d ensure that people got exercise, took yoga classes, or that they maintained a stress free life as in doing meditation every morning and evening. You’d keep them out of stressful polluted traffic every day. You’d have them walk daily. You’d make sure they had respirators or masks in air polluted areas. If insurance did those things, it would be health insurance. It would be sickness prevention.

In America sickness is a profit center. Cancer alone is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Consider all the money required to maintain a person through cancer treatments. It easily averages over a million dollars (about the same amount required to support each troop in Afghanistan for a year). Industries profit on that. The insurance industry, the medical device industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the nursing home industry (and of course the war profiteers), all profit from Americans’ pain, suffering, and death. Call it PSD.

We have a lot of people who complain about the sick industries and the expense of PSD. People pay a lot for insurance. Even if a claim is honored, people have co-payments. They fight daily to get hospital bills paid by their so-called insurance. There is a profit incentive for the insurance industry to deny care. Their business model is to find ways to avoid paying claims and to take in as much in premiums as possible. They know that Americans willingly pay for insurance. Even when they raise their rates by double digit percentages, Americans pay. Even if insurance companies deny claims and people suffer and die for lack of care, they will still pay. Tens of thousands of Americas continue to die annually but they still pay for insurance. It’s an incredibly profitable industry that easily takes in a 30% margin over its costs, and makes huge profits. Very few industries do that.

Americans are conditioned like lab rats to pay hundreds every month, thousands every year, for questionable and often worthless insurance. Obamacare got more people to buy insurance. Authored mainly by Elizabeth Fowler, a prior insurance company executive, either Obamacare is a genius piece of legislation or it’s taking Americans for a ride (depending on if you’re an investor or not). Now millions more Americans pay for questionable sickness insurance. When they get sick, you can bet the first order of business for their insurers is to find ways to deny their claims. And now the government requires by law that all people pay for sickness insurance or they will be fined. So if you have insurance you pay to be denied sickness coverage, and if you don’t have insurance, you pay government fines.

The theory is that if people don’t have insurance, they will be taken care of anyway and everyone else will have to pay for it. That’s only true for legislators, government officials, and the active military who are all 100% covered by government funds at no cost whatsoever. For everyone else this would be true if insurance companies actually paid to help people through sickness. But they don’t. The reality is the opposite, which is to say insurance companies don’t pay. People with insurance suffer and die for lack of care because insurance is not care. It is a business. People without insurance also suffer and die, but at least they don’t pay premiums. They pay government penalties.

And what do we do to insure health? Nothing. Healthy Americans are a liability for the American PSD industries and their stockholders. Those industries depend on pain, suffering and death for their livelihood and profits. In fact PSD enterprises comprise about one sixth of the national economy. Without PSD our country would suffer a great monetary impact. Entire industries could go out of business. Do you work for the insurance industry? Do you willingly work for blood money? Those who have pain, who suffer, or die for lack of sick care, do so for our protected PSD industries to maintain high profits. It’s a uniquely American way of death.

Big Problem with the Universal Healthcare Movement or WTF is Single Payer?

"Single Payer" is some anonymously coined term (as far as I know) that supposedly describes the concept of a single government entity, such as a national government healthcare agency (not unlike the Veterans Administration), which would replace all commercial healthcare insurance companies. More accurately it has been called Medicare for All, which, in fact, is the title of a piece of legislation that has been kicked around for years in Congress, yet never killed. And why? Because the government in its infinite wisdom must appease any growing outcry from all the little people out there so they can continue to receive "campaign contributions" from the sickness industries. It is my considered opinion that the term was coined, probably well thought out in advance, by our paranoid little government in its never ending fear of losing control over all its people, as if it ever owned all its people.

Who came up with the ridiculous phrase? Some secret think tank or New England university choir boys group who decided that mommy and daddy's never ending money supply might be in danger of deflating by a few percent due to a few undesirables who have a problem with being considered dispensable for the sake of the multi-trillion dollar sickness industries in America, that's who. Tens of thousands die annually in America due to the lack of real heath care. They suffer and die for corporate profits. And insurance proves time and again that it is not health care. It is the denial of care. It is a profit center. 

Cancer alone is a multi-trillion dollar annual industry. But you won't hear "Single Payer" advocates or activists (as they think of themselves); you will rarely ever hear them refer to an American sickness conglomerate of industries or the fact than even just one arm of it profits in the trillions on the sickness, suffering, and deaths of their so precious free American co-citizens. No, you will never hear that. Why? Because the US government ultimately controls activist groups and has notoriously infiltrated each and every activist group in this country. This is a known fact regardless of whether you call it conspiracy theory or not. American agencies place infiltrators at the highest levels of activists groups. That is why there are ridiculously misunderstood terms like "single payer" used to describe the crux of activists' concern. No. That is not their concern. Their concern is human life, the forsaking of human life for profit. Greed rules America. People die. Insurance is not healthcare. Those are the concerns.

Now if so called activists really wanted to end this criminality, this forsaking of life, this outrage that flies in the face of American freedom, this dispensing of people for profit; if indeed they wanted to be true activists, they would drop all their insurance polices. They wine and moan about how the insurance industry denies care, costs so much overhead, allows people to die and what do they do? They willing buy insurance from the criminals they fight.  Ludicrous. And then when they need insurance they get denied. They too suffer. Wake up! You are educated people. Think for yourself. Your money is your control.

If you want to go up against big insurance, you drop your insurance. You don't pay. You don't pay outrageous bills. You vote with your feet and your wallet. You allow yourself to get bad credit ratings because that's what true activists do. Going to a sit-in at the local insurance tower and getting arrested is not a sacrifice. That's a show with minimal effect. Forsake your credit ratings. Show your true power and commitment. Until you do that you will never have respect. Because money is all they understand. Nothing else matters. Not life. Not politics. Not freedom. Not this country or its ideals. No way in hell does any of that matter to American industry. All that matters is money. And the people have the power to cut off the money. You have that power. It's your money! You are funding your own doom. Are you freaking nuts? Or are you an investor in suffering and death? My mistake then.

How many activists out there still have insurance policies. Raise your hands. Yes. 99% of you. You aren't really activists are you.? You're spineless! Yes you work hard and I respect that, but your energy is misplaced and misspent. Work smart. Do something that matters. If a real movement were afoot to drop insurance you can bet it would change things in an instant.

News flash! Change does not happen in government. You will not find a champion to elect in government that gives enough of a flying fart about your life over their own. Would they risk embarrassment? Would they risk making waves? Would they risk their own credit ratings? Their reelection? Their job? Being ostracized? No! You think peoples' lives matter to anyone in government compared to the millions of dollars in donations they can get from industry? You are whacked out of your mind if you do.

Change happens when Martin Luther King marches, or when Rosa Parks gets on a bus, or when Bruce Springsteen drops a concert. It never happens when government signs a bill, because government will never sign a bill until someone forces their hand. Force their hand! Do not pay for insurance. Do not pay ludicrous health costs. Don't do it! It's criminal. 

Two Cents.

The Imporatnce of Theme, and other stuff

Steven Pressfield wrote an incredibly inspirational blog (I Can't Squeeze my Theme In) about theme. At least for writers, it's inspirational. You don't add the theme. It's already there, he says.

My wife tells me I can't see ghosts like she does because I can't let go and just relax. Apparently she experiences dead relatives alternately consoling or annoying her. She watches a lot of ghost realty TV too.

Then there's the thing about finding when you don't seek, and not finding when you do. Let it go. Use the force.

Ten there's the thing about, you don't find your passion, it finds you; you don't place your theme, it's already there. But you can't see it because you won't let go. That's how we met. Neither of us looking.

I'm convinced our frustration is due to our rat raced societal structure that imposes routine on our lives. What if we didn't all follow a circadian rhythm? Are we circadians? What if we didn't all go to work at dawn and return hone at dusk? What if we dared to sleep-in everyday? What if we refused to be pawns to the evil of money? Yeah, I know the conditioned answer is that without these things we would die or become homeless. Not true. But it's hard isn't it? To ignore our environment and peers? No it's not. Ignorance is easy. Just be selective about it.

And a few days after Pressfield's post, his editor, Shawn, writes Designated Driver to impress upon us how important his Theme post is. Yes it is. It makes me think. Actually. How daring. It's like the time I grabbed a rope, hung from a tree by a river bank, and swung right out and dropped into the water. The kids with me were shocked. I was always the reserved one. I didn't even know I could swim. That's one way to learn.