For more on how sick this profit-driven system has become, see Robert Greenwald’s SICK FOR PROFIT, a five-minute or so film about how we are all getting screwed by these filthy rich bastards who pretend that they’re offering their customers healthcare, but are really busy stuffing their pockets with greenbacks and enjoying the high life:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICDKY5CwexA

Huh? What could this possibly mean to a family dealing with a child who needs heart surgery and whose insurance refuses to cover the surgery, as happened to a friend of mine? I offered to bring her to and from the hospital, but I wasn’t about to take care of the six-figure bill.

And about just showing up at a hospital when you need care–this is not a solution either, despite what former President Bush opined. I’m happy for you that it has worked for you, but this kind of care is rationing. Every time you or someone else shows up in the ER, someone else who needs the services you are using is going without. And we all are stuck with the bill of millions and millions who use the ER as a medical clinic because they have no other choice.

I do agree with you that we need healthcare insurance to go the way of the buggy whip. We also agree that Big Pharma is preying upon consumers. Bush passing a six-billion dollar Medicare prescription drug plan that he didn’t plan to pay for also was a bad idea as he didn’t make the drug companies compete or lower their prices, making this yet another of that moron’s corporate hand-outs.

So we agree on the small points, but I would like to see a single-payer government-run insurance program that puts all the others wither on the vine. I think the Post Office and Medicare work just fine. And my mother-in-law’s social security check arrives every month on schedule.

Personally, like you, I would also like to see a LOT more emphasis on curtailing big pharma and the insurance industry. Write to your legislators! Write to Obama! Keep the pressure on!

If there is one thing I have witnesses throughout this debate, is that EVERYONE, across the board is interested in having the ill cared for, and cared for well. That is not the issue. The issue is how will the care they receive be paid for.

My family of four has been without health insurance for almost six years, since our monthly premium topped out at $1200 a month, being charged by an insurance company that made record profits that year. We are self-employed and always the first to be hit when the economy slows down. We pay as we go and often do not go. That is why I take this issue to heart. I know how difficult it is to receive necessary medical care and how impossible it is to pay for it.

But, what I am saying is the medical care is there and it is excellent care, although not as good as it could be if there were not so many middle men involved. I simply feel that adding another middle man to the process would not fix the problem for the average person. Insurance is not the answer, care for the sick in all instances is the answer. As it is now, I have never been turned away for care by the hospital or the doctors because I didn’t have insurance. I believe that is the case across the board.

I would like to see us go to work on eliminating the health insurances part in driving up the cost of care and eliminate the drug companies part in driving up the cost of medicine. This would drive down the cost of health care, and a low cost health insurance policy would cover extra-ordinary expenses with a reasonable deductible. From a business, economic standpoint it would work to provide everyone with health care for all medical conditions and well care. Those who cannot afford it would be covered as they are now by Medicaid and Medicare.

I agree with many of Dorothy’s points but I think it’s naive to think that without government intervention, healthcare reform would happen on its own. Republicans are not ashamed to say that they vote for their pockets (ask any of them); and they have a really hard time with the government stepping in to help those who are poor. The thinking is, Hey, if I can do it, so can you! Except that if you were born to a single mom on crack and attended a school with overcrowded classes, sorry, but you are not starting out on a level playing field (just to use a cliche as an all too real example).

I have catastrophic care and because my deductible is so high, I have put off having a colonoscopy and bone density exam. Catastrophic insurance is BS. Plus, they keep raising my rates! And my gynecologist has many reasons, I’m sure, for charging the fees she does, but why is it that all the doctors I know in France are living very well, with long summer vacations and summer homes without charging the outrageous rates we have here in America? (My husband is French so I am knowledgeable on the subject; and no, their system is not perfect but it beats the hell out of ours.) Plus, French people have free healthcare, which is one reason this worldwide recession hasn’t hit them as hard as us. But God forbid we should look at what other industrialized nations are doing ’cause we’re America and we’re so big and strong and everyone wants to move here!! If we keep sticking our heads in the sand, I fear for this country.

Lastly, waiting for all our nice neighbors to step in and help us out when the going gets tough is fairy tale land.

When children are suffering from poor dental hygiene, when citizens have malnutrition from poverty and from eating fast food, when one-third of all Americans are obese (which they are), you cannot expect them to be contributing citizens. They’ll be too busy lugging their oxygen tanks around and shooting themselves up with insulin.

And I’m not quite sure of what you are proposing–that Carine do her own pap smears with a hand-mirror and a popsicle stick? What is this “we must save ourselves” about? If I get cancer again, am I supposed to whip out a kitchen knife and guess where the borders of my tumor are, then stitch myself up with dental floss? Catastrophic insurance only? Are you kidding? I need to get checked once every six months. Talk about death squads–your way of thinking would condemn me to the equivalent as I wouldn’t be able to take preventative measures.

And where do you get off saying government doesn’t need to “rescue the needy?” Are you going to drive over to my friend’s home and clean the trachea of her CP child once an hour all through the night, then gleefully put on a pair of pantyhose and traipse off to work for nine hours, then come home and do intensive childcare all over again? Because that is what it takes to handle a disability of this nature. Are you against the government stepping in and investing the hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes to keep this child alive?

Clearly, you have been blessed with either excellent health or excellent healthcare insurance–which someone pays for. Who is it, you, your partner, or the government?

And where do you get off stating that “And everyone knows that malpractice insurance is driving physicians away from practicing medicine. Fear. All based on fear. and greed. If physicians didn’t have to pay out huge sums of money in malpractice insurance, again, our doctor’s visits would be much more affordable.”?

This is baloney and aimed at creating a mental picture of a big welfare mama cruising around in a Cadillac after suing the doctor for some imagined slight. My son suffered brain damage after a doctor and hospital damaged him at birth.

Guess what, Dorothy? The maximum I could have won in litigation is $250,00–or about what we spent on his care during his first five years of his life, with no insurance reimbursement because the friendly insurance company bureaucrats claimed he wasn’t damaged enough. Imgagine that, he wasn’t damaged enough.

Restrictions against suing doctors are iron-clad. The error has to be so egregious–death or complete, visible disability, not some kid of damage deep in an infant’s brain–before the arbitration agreement you must sign prior to treatment gets tossed out and you are allowed to go to court. So, again, you are wrong.

And guess what the attorneys said to me? “Either you can sue and get two-thirds of the maximum, or you can put the energy into your child over the next five years, which is how long it takes for these cases to wind through the court system.” Guess which I chose, Dorothy?

I don’t know who you are or where you get off, but you seem to be mouthing the same rhetoric I’ve heard on AM Talkradio. I find your ramblings profoundly disturbing, not simply because they made no sense, but because they are so divorced from real life.