Here is a short piece by Sara Robinson. It's about Health care.
--Kim
Sara's Post
If there was one single country on this planet that was successfully fulfilling its citizens' healthcare needs through free-market solutions, you can bet that we'd have been hearing about it every hour of every day for the past 30 years. The Republican media would have never shut up about it.
But...notice those crickets? That's because that country doesn't exist. Every other developed country on earth has some form of government-supported health care scheme. Every. Last. One.
And that's because there is no free-market solution to this problem.
That's why the Republicans are in this bind. They've been promising to roll out their handy-dandy fix-it-all free-market alternative health care plan literally every few months since 2009. That's SIXTEEN YEARS.
And they have never actually come out with one -- because there simply is no solution that works within the limits of their ideology. They don't even have the concept of an idea of a plan. There are no models anywhere they can point to as proof of a single workable policy point.
But they also aren't willing to admit that there are any major problems that the free market can't solve. In their theology, this is simply Not Possible. If they concede this, they'll have to give up the entire game. So they're stuck.
Finally, after all these years, they're standing in front of the American people with their pants down and their asses out. There's no more hiding the hard truth: there's only one way forward, and they're blocking it for one stupid reason: because they refuse to admit that their free-market fundamentalist religion has led US health care policy to a literal dead end.
People are going to die in the months ahead because the True Believers won't admit they're out of ideas. Political careers are already blowing up on the right. Hundreds of small town hospitals are going to fold. Our health care system, which has never recovered from the hit of COVID, may well collapse entirely. It's going to be a hard year for everyone when it comes to health care.
The only upside is that we may finally be able to walk away from the futile fiction that the Republicans have the will or the ability to solve this. Nobody can possibly believe that any more. And that final collapse might open the door to a serious (and long overdue) re-imagining of our entire healthcare system. We're ready for solutions that finally squeeze the profiteers out of the system, and return the business of health to doctors, patients, and communities.
Until then: take care of yourselves. Please. Because right now, we're living in the Republicans' libertarian dream world: completely on our own. This is what they wished for - their idea of neoliberal heaven. And now that we're all getting to live in it, we can't help but notice that it looks a whole more like hell.
Steve Barnes
You're absolutely right, but their insistence on a for-profit, private-only system predates 2009. They were against even Medicare for seniors (they called it socialism) in the 1960s and may continue to oppose it.
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