Healthcare a Metaphor for U.S. Political Pathology
Americans spend fifty to one hundred percent more than any other country on their healthcare, only to be the only one of them lacking universal coverage, rated 39th best on the planet by the World Health Organization, and only to have life span, infant mortality and disease prevalence statistics for which you’d have to be Zimbabwean to be jealous.
The events of the last six months have demonstrated that we in the U.S. also have a political system worthy of intensive care, to go along with the broken health of our society that that very political system is supposed to be fixing.
To me, the most astonishing aspect of healthcare ‘reform’ is the degree to which we have unflinchingly normalized the greed-driven, self-serving, me-first (-and-second-third-and-last) logic of the legislative process, to the point where we don’t really even notice it anymore. Doctors, hospitals, pharmaceuticals and especially insurance companies have now mustered literally six lobbyists for every single member of Congress, prowling about the town all for one purpose only. It’s purely about profit.
America, alone among the developed democracies of the world, has a singular devotion to regressive ideas, no matter how much harm they cause. This patient is in grave condition nowadays, its body abused severely by three decades of regressive debauchery.
[Excerpt of an article by David Michael Green]
