Medicare for All

True health care reform is the new anti-slavery movement. Not since the dark days of yokes and chains have we faced an issue so burning with the moral imperative for change.

The current profits-over-people private health insurance industry must go, just as it has in nearly the entire expanse of the planet. Just like slavery, America stands alone as the last developed country that not only allows, but actively encourages, a private profit-making middle-man industry to thrive at the expense of human health. This industry made $17 billion in profits last year alone, while an average of 122 people die each day from the inability to get health care.

None of us are secure. A lost job, changing family dynamics, grave illness or any other of life's many vagaries can lead to a termination of one's ability to get insurance. Ever-soaring premiums leave the rest of us a worried, financially depleted mess.

The real crime is that the current system is absolutely unnecessary. From the start, it was conceived as a profit center for the few at the expense of the many. Private insurers are nothing more than meddling middle-men who do nothing to add value to our life-saving health delivery system. This is why they spend hundreds of millions greasing the politicians, who do Olympian-sized acrobatic maneuvers to put on the appearance of "reform" while protecting the insurers' lock on the system.

BILLIONS in profits in a system that were the American people to awaken, they would see is so useless we would end it in a heartbeat. This is the reason they spend millions in propaganda, to paint reformers as "socialists," and the United States government as an evil, incompetent good-for-nothing enemy of the people.

Newspapers, themselves the beneficiaries of insurance advertising money, are tripping all over themselves promoting reform, but they perform the same acrobatics with noble prose made meaningless by the omission of the key to real reform: abolition of our current for-profit health insurance system.

It is imperative to note here that those in the industry are good people, doing what they are supposed to do by maximizing profit. It is the system that is the problem. And it is only a matter of time before we change it, for the immorality of this system that puts profits ahead of people is so great, so obvious, that this truth will not long remain hidden.

Expanding Medicare for all is the only true reform. We could harness the tremendous efficiencies of a system we already have in operation. Total overhead costs and waste would go from the current 33 percent (the approximate low end of the scale) to under 4 percent, providing enough savings to cover us all and do so more cheaply.

Never again would we lose insurance. Never would we be denied for pre-existing conditions. Never would a private insurer meddle between us and our doctors. Medicare for all is the only true reform solution. It is the future. And the future has arrived.

Me? Savvy?

**This was my off the cuff (from the heart) response on the Courier-Journal's Point Taken blog to a detractor's charge that I was not "savvy". As it turns out this perfectly summarizes my philosophy, and why I would not be a good political candidate--at least in the conventional sense.
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Me? Savvy? I have no idea--I hate labels and do not live my life with them in mind. I am probably not at all savvy in the sense of political gamesmanship. As I just said I do not let "public opinion" influence what I see as truth, as what will best benefit our greater public interest, long term. Thus, I will always choose speaking and standing for truth before I help encourage my country, my people from charging over the cliff, be that an illegal, immoral and counterproductive war or the continuation of a philosophy that lets the wolves guard our henhouse, that protects the wealth of the few at the expense of the many.