Hillary Clinton has embraced a mandatory insurance plan reminiscent of Republican rival Mitt Romney's, as she tacitly admits that she can't beat the insurance companies or pry their talons off of health care financing in this country.
In that regard, at least, the next two presidential terms will be business as usual. Neither party apparently has the stones or the integrity to try to provide equal access to treatment across the financial spectrum.
Remember: your value is measured in dollars. Get lots of dollars and you will be all right. The market is wise and will reward the best people and products that humanity can produce.
Really? Then why do opium, tobacco, alcohol and gambling do so well? People are willing to pay for them well beyond the point at which they provide any improvement to the quality of life. Drugs are so popular we have to have laws against them and devote kilos of money and time to try to eradicate them. That's the free market in action. The drug dealers don't even get to hire the best ad agencies and flood the airwaves with carefully calculated messages to promote their product. Demand rides high on word of mouth alone.
John Stossel presented an infomercial for laissez-faire economics the other night, lambasting socialized medicine and lauding the market-based approach. The leaps of logic and begged questions went by too fast for me to catalog and consider them all. It masqueraded as an in-depth news analysis, but its slant was clear from the outset. Socialized medicine bad. Free-market health care for profit good.
Okay, okay, I get the picture. Maybe it's time to quit voting and let the country run itself. I feel sorry for my friends' children, and for my nephew and children-in-law. But hey. The only thing you're guaranteed in this life is a death.
About all human beings do is fuck and argue anyway. In the freewheeling past, our sex drive slightly offset the destructive forces of famine, pestilence and our crappy personalities. No one had to think too hard about anything. In fact, it was probably better if you didn't. Unfortunately, a few people thought a little more and a little more clearly, enhancing our survival ability and our capacity to kill each other at the same time. Even so, people got more and more hooked on the idea of long, prosperous, somewhat peaceful lives. That pursuit of peace and prosperity has led to more complex arguments degenerating into larger and bloodier wars as time has gone by.
Money and advanced technology obscure the animal nature of human activity and the philosophies used to try to exalt it to some higher status. There isn't even anyone to tell, because the few who can see it for what it is have no power to change it. I mention it merely to go on record as one who noticed. I will now shut up and let it run its course unchecked. I will probably continue my local activities, futile as they may be, just for something to do while I wait for my exit cue. I have some friends here, and I hate to let them down.
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