The Health Care “Reform” Scam

…and Corporate Ownership of the R&D end

Past Posts to the Issues:

REAL Health Care Reform

Angry Letter to My Blue Dog CongressCritter

Scam of Ages

The Great Unicorn Flu Panic of 2009

Some Herbal Wonders

Every day we’re encouraged and cajoled to call and write our representatives to encourage them to include some sort of public option in their ridiculous sham of a street theater road show deceptively called “Health Care Reform,” long since bought and paid for by the health insurance industry itself. They want us to beg – and we have begged and begged some more – but they’re not going to give us anything. Never intended to, this is just a show. What is planned isn’t any sort of reform at all of a system designed on purpose to kill off those pesky (and too numerous) Baby Boomers as well as all the excess no-longer-employable working class slaves the nation’s banks and brokers no longer need or want, along with sickly citizens of all descriptions. Sooner, not later.

There are some who want to believe the current swine flu epidemic and planned vaccination program is genocide-writ-large, but it’s not. It’s just a bug that got out and deaths from it or its vaccines won’t even be half the annual toll from regular seasonal flu. Which will kill its 30-50 thousand come January/February and nobody will think a thing of it. Instead, what we’ve got is this complete sham of a health care non-debate that is really just another corporate bailout for crooks who don’t need or deserve a single cent of our hard-earned money.

With or without a so-called public option, insurance rates are expected to double by 2020, which is when any reform legislation is scheduled to actually take effect. Making the ‘average’ expenditure for a family of four somewhere between $24,000 and $30,000 per year by 2020. Or, a full half of total income for the middle of the middle class, higher than rent or mortgage, higher than food and clothes, higher than any other expenditure in any family’s budget. And for that price families will not receive any health care. That they must pay for out of pocket with whatever they’ve got left over. And the so-swell public option? Predicted to save that ‘average’ family maybe $2200 to $2500 a year! Whoa!!! For that price Mom could get a mammogram this year! Though not in 2020, by which time it’ll cost $5000 out of pocket.

This – and the ever-worsening situation in health care itself (as the 3rd leading cause of death quickly gaining on heart disease and cancer) – is the real upcoming genocide, and it will be done with an eye to preserving the profits of the top 10% in the futures market in human suffering while further impoverishing what’s left of the middle class and destroying the public health care delivery system in its entirety. Not to worry – the rich and beautiful can afford to fly to Singapore for that no-machine quadruple bypass operation, or to Rio for that nice young, healthy liver harvested from some nameless street urchin. What there won’t be are public hospitals where the poor, the middle class and the non-millionaire elderly can go for treatment of their ills and less likely to die than they would have been if they’d stayed home.

Wages for the working class haven’t kept up with inflation for 30+ years, they’re not going to be going up any time soon with a projected 15-20% of Americans to be permanently out of work before the government’s done bailing out the rich with our grandchildren’s no-longer existent future, another 40% will be permanently underemployed and forever underpaid, a drain on profit recovery for the Wall Street, bank and insurance set. Superfluous population in a non-producing state. We’re supposed to die quickly and quietly without complaint as the corporate shills take what little money we’ve might have left, and they won’t miss us a bit when we’re gone.

They’re busy giving the Murder-by-Spreadsheet crowd a full decade of no controls so they can price 90% of Americans out of the market entirely before ‘reform’ ensues. I don’t know about anybody else, but I have no intention of paying half the family income for nothing. And the possible savings of $2200 on premiums a decade from now for a public option that’s more of a public joke doesn’t impress me in the least. If I have to buy health care on my own as I need it, I’m not giving half my income away just so health care will be even farther out of my reach.

Here’s some links to what’s real:

Health costs to rise 10% in 2010

Small Business Faces Sharp Rise in Costs of Health Care

Employer-sponsored Health Insurance Premiums Projected to Double by 2020

Federal employees’ health insurance premiums to rise 8.8%

The Cost of Not Having a Public Option

HRSA Health Center Program

UPDATE (from time of writing) – Hubby and I got back early this morning from a seminar and lecture in Chapel Hill, Bob Del Tredici’s photo-work on the many victims of atomic arrogance over the years. Gave a short presentation at lunch and worked the roundtable, Sue Sturgis (ISS), Triangle area activist/legal teams against the “nuclear renaissance” now ongoing, all sponsored by the UNC-CH Department of Art & Epidemiology – a new self-bestowed title by the principals, whose departments and buildings are all now 100% corporate-owned, the entire medical/public health blocs owned by Big Pharma and Bank of America. Yes, it most definitely DOES have serious and immediate affect on the huge UNC research departments, including epidemiology. I swear those guys look positively harried, their work is consistently shut down whenever their subjects or conclusions don’t toe the corporate line.

Discovered something from the activist legal guys about how coalitions with various long-time environmentalist org supporters are being insidiously disrupted by their embracing of a single-issue defense against Duke and the nuclear gangs – COST IS ALL. Meaning the only way to deal with present and planned nukes is to keep hitting them with the cost angle, and forget all about the health and safety angles that are as serious as they’ve ever been.

My contribution: That’s a set-up for utter failure, don’t give up the bridge just yet! What ‘they’ learned about TMI – given 30 long years of intensive cover-up and lots of death and destruction – is not to inform the public of accidents and releases. Ever. They’re even quite honest about it, and that’s the reason you never hear about such things these days at all, though they happen daily.

I pointed out the devious back-door strategy that seemed quite obvious to me, but not to them. By focusing exclusively on the financial issue to fight expansions, re-licensing of plants at the end of their terms, and planned new units, all ‘they’ have to do in the end is shove some massive amounts of gold in that back door and all resistance has to melt away! I pointed out that “nobody could have foreseen” that when crooked bankers and brokers crashed the entire world’s economic systems, the Fed stepped in (with IMF) to simply bail it out with unaccountable trillions – we’re not even allowed to know who got it or how much! If ‘they’ play their political cards right (and yes, they do have ample political cards to play), the nuclear cash cow can definitely be in line for just such a thing to trump the cost angle on the global warming excuse.

It’s inevitable, and entirely predictable. The secrecy/NS angles on health and safety have only gotten considerably worse over the last 30 years and still worse with the demise of the good ol’ Cold War. Nukes have NOT become any safer, the proliferation risk is still what it always was if not worse, and the players are every single bit as evil and stupid as they have been from the git-go. They’re just not reporting on their regular and emergency dumps anymore, and still pretending that huge increases in cancer in nuke neighborhoods can’t be pinned on them. Worse, they enjoy dedicated legal protections all around to cover their asses on all levels.

This was forwarded to me from Steve Wing this morning – if you’re interested in what’s going on behind the HCR scenes from those who already know they own the process and will get whatever they want from our erstwhile representatives, definitely read the whole thing. It’ll make you sick…

The Cancer Market Outlook to 2013

It’s a lucrative commodity. Do you really believe that if someone – say, like a big university researcher who worked very hard for many years before his department was bought by Searle or Pharmacia – actually discovered a cure for cancer, s/he would ever be able to publish or market such a thing? Because if you do, I’ve a dandy bridge in Brooklyn I’ll sell you for cheap…