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Americans exist in a Zombie state because they think our employer
based healthcare system is acceptable or inevitable. Just because it's what we've always had doesn't mean we have to continue with an insanity where we keep chipping away at a broken system, thinking that suddenly it will work after 60 years of failure.
My husband receives his health insurance policy through my employer. Recently, I received a ten page letter with confusing instructions saying that if I did not provide proper documentation proving that my husband 1) is my husband 2) that he does not receive health insurance from his place of work 3) he will be dropped from our policy as of 10/30.
Wading through the language of this letter was time consuming and frustrating. This experience led me to conclude that these jobs where we go and punch a time clock every day are nothing more than indentured servitude, a form of job-lock where you are stuck in a job with no hope of breaking free for fear of losing health insurance, whose coverage is getting less and less adequate by the passing day.
And if I misplace this paper and forget about it, my husband would lose his insurance, without any hope of getting it back, unless he changed employers, of whom many with hold health insurance
for 3 to 6 months.
I ask you: Where is the outrage?
We saw Wendell Potter on Saturday September 19, at the Free Public Library in Philadelphia. He has been radicalized by his epiphany at seeing the health insurance companies for what they are: cold blooded murderers. He too was in a zombie state, answering to stock holders everyday instead of facing spot on the suffering of families who everyday lose their loved ones when health insurance companies
deny their claims.
Now Wendell Potter is one of us.
We are the only industrialized nation who does not have a civilized healthcare system. Even South Africa implemented a Single Payer healthcare system, after the collapse of Apartheid.
The employer based healthcare system is America's very own brand of Apartheid. We are held down and brutalized everyday here in America by the health insurance companies.
The corporate mentality, shop until you drop, watch TV until you're comatose, plus pharmaceutical drug and alcohol abuse has dropped a curtain over the American psyche.
flickr image by Lost in Transit collective
The following is a list of non-violent acts of Civil Disobedience that other movements, such as the American Civil Rights movement, the Gay Rights movement, all the anti-war movements and anti-nuke movements used with great results.
1) Refuse to pay health insurance premiums since they aren't paying when you get sick, anyway.
2) Start a campaign involving demonstrations every weekday for a year in front of health insurance companies all across America. These demonstrations would showcase caskets and poster pictures of people who died as a result of denied care.
3) Stage sit-ins at insurance companies and outside Capitol Buildings protesting Apartheid of the employer healthcare system in America.
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