The Big Three: Help Wanted There Only

I have been waiting for a great summary like this, a clear and complete explanation of what real reform would have entailed from the health industry perspective, from someone whose career is in that industry, from the horses mouth as it were.

I hate to be blunt, but as this writer describes, much of the health care industry has become just like more pigs at the public and the private trough.

The situation in the health industry is very similar to that of two other bloated industries: the military industry and the financial industry. The stark fact is that the health, the military, and the financial industries (Wall Street / the huge banks) are essentially the only three large scale industries left in the United States not subject to the devastating impact of severe recession and depression forces. Most and probably all other large industries are left to implode and rot from more or less permanent severe recession and depression. While employment in the "Big Three" will stay roughly the same or even go up a little, employment in the far larger number of large, depression-impacted industries has gone down, will continue to go down, and will not be coming back under the kind of total right wing control of the economy that you have in the US.

Notice that it is, ironically given all the free market propaganda, taxpayer money and the Government that propels those Big Three industries and protects them from the ravages of economic depression. It is not market forces. There is a massive, unprecedented distortion and perversion of the market involved in the favoritism shown toward the Big Three. Specifically, tax payers and creditors such as China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia are paying or investing through the teeth to engineer a vast increase in the amount of goods and services that are produced and sold in the US by those three particular large industries. The health deform is to legally force some people who have been trying to avoid this perversion and distortion to join in it.

But this is the essence of what the health care deform is really, secretly all about. It allows the health care industry to join the other two as part of the Big Three that will be protected by the Government (and by extension by the people who fund that Government) from the depression that is indefinitely hitting and gradually imploding most other industries. Or to use the metaphor, it is these three industries that are getting on the lifeboats of the Titanic, so that they can then in effect be rescued by another ship. Meanwhile, everybody else gets no lifeboat, but merely the false comfort of rearranged deck chairs and a macabre entertainment while the ship goes down.

Oh, but you were not entertained by the Tiger Woods story nor by the story about the couple that attended Obama’s shindig uninvited? Too bad, you were supposed to be entertained, so that your mind could be taken off the fact that you are being economically abandoned and drowned by your government.

Since 1980 if not longer the US frequently goes from bad to worse under the cover of “reforms” and “commissions”. "Reforming" something is merely an excuse for the pigs to make sure that more and more feed comes into the trough for more gorging. What an irony, for example, that Medicare could be the keystone of a valid and successful reform, but in actual fact the crazed Democrats are CUTTING certain aspects of Medicare and not increasing eligibility for it at all.

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The above was in response to this article by Phillip Caper at Common Dreams.