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Without universal health care there can be no reform of our absurd health care system

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Message Ed Martin

As long as insurance companies are involved in our health care system, there will be no real health care available for us. You've heard it all your life, You gotta have insurance, you gotta have insurance. Malarky. As a moment of consideration will show you, you don't need insurance, you need medical care.

Consider the following question: Why are you paying a company to provide you medical care that can not provide you medical care?

That's about as absurd as it gets, but it's true. Here's the proof.

You get sick, need medical care. When you leave the house to go do something about it you don't go to an insurance company, you go to see a doctor. When you have a medical emergency and call an ambulance, the EMTs don't load you up and take you to an insurance company, they know what they're doing, they take you to a medical establishment.

The reason for that is that you and the EMTs know that no insurance company can provide you with any kind of medical care, at all. And yet, we've invested with these insurance companies to do just that. Not only can the insurance companies not provide medical care, they can refuse to pay for the medical care that you have paid them to provide for you.

The purpose of insurance companies is to prevent as much medical care for you as is possible. Their operating principle is that you will pay them more for medical care than they will provide. It's set up that way. You're always going to pay for more than what you get. No other commercial business operates that way. You pay $1.49 a pound for potatoes, you get a full pound of potatoes. You pay $39.95 for a pair of pants, you get a whole pair of pants.

Not so with insurance companies. You pay them a fee to provide medical care that will keep you alive, and they can refuse to pay for it, and you die for the lack of what you paid for.

Insurance companies are in charge of most people's medical care. Let's see what would happen if the insurance companies were to take over the grocery store industry and apply their operating principle to that business. You sign up with the insurance company and pay them a fee to provide you with food. You go to the grocery store to get some food to sustain your life. The manager there says that there's a problem. He says that upon examining your record, you're shown to have a pre-existing condition and are denied access to food. The pre-existing condition? Hunger. It's a fact that you've been hungry before, therefore they can not serve you.

You go to your doctor with a medical problem. Your doctor does an examination, makes a diagnosis and determines what treatment you are to have. He also uses his medical expertise to determine what medical treatment you are not to have, by the process of exclusion. He won't splint your leg as a treatment for pneumonia.

The insurance company also makes determinations about what medical treatment you are not to have. By refusing to pay for what you have paid them for that would keep you alive. Without any medical training or expertise. That's doing what only your doctor can do. That's practicing medicine without a license.

We have 535 members of Congress, all of whom have excellent medical care. No matter how they fiddle with, screw around with, change and distort our so-called health care system, they will still have the same, excellent medical care for themselves. They have no interest in improving health care, nothing they do will have any effect on them. They don't need health care reform.

Given that, it's supremely ironic that there are over 300 million of us who need health care reform and will have no say in it, and that the 535 people who do not need health care reform will be the only ones who have any say in at all. Tail wagging dog.

No matter what health care system Congress comes up with it will be a jury-rigged, half-assed abortion of a system, with insurance companies still involved in it. To actually reform health care, they would have come up with a fully developed, complete and functional system, universal health care.

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Ed Martin is an ordinary person who is recovering from being badly over-educated. Born in the middle of the Great Depression, he is not affiliated with nor a member of any political, social or religious organization. He is especially interested in (more...)
 
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