Health Care Reform: A Reality Check

Let’s see if I have this straight. Corporate American will run most of the nation’s health care industry by providing first rate medical insurance coverage for more than 90 percent of the nation’s population while reducing costs. This is good because free markets are good. Now this is the same corporate America that said deregulation of the financial services industry would create perpetual prosperity when in fact it brought the nation’s banks to its knees. Corporate America championed home ownership for every family and approved mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them and created refinancing schemes that resulted in millions of home foreclosures and financial ruin for millions of families. This is corporate American that created financial weapons of mass destruction (such as collateral debt obligations) that practically know one understands that drained trillions of dollars from the economy and into the pockets of rich guys.. This is corporate America whose executives paid themselves billions of dollars in bonuses while the nation teetered on financial collapse. This is corporate America who claims every kid should go in debt up to his or her eyeballs to get trained for a job while sending millions of jobs overseas and cutting work hours and benefits back home. And this is corporate America that sells around 371 billion cigarettes a year for an estimated $82 billion dollars. This is corporate America that sells $100 billion dollars a year in booze. This is corporate America that spends hundreds of millions of dollars advertising drugs on television with side effects that can kill. And this is corporate America that racks in an estimated $2.7 trillion a year on people being sick. Well, the Obama Administration may strike up the band if congress passes a health care reform bill. And the mass media will applaud, claiming it “was the moral thing do” when in fact it was the immoral thing to do placing the nation’s health care in the hands of corporate America. When there are profits to be made off of sick people, believe me, there will be more sick people than ever.