Discontent with Healthcare Reform

I have neglected putting much thought into the healthcare reform debate. I was once a staunch supporter of a single-payer system, for a couple reasons that we'll go into. However in the last few years, it's become increasingly apparent to me that the underlying problem to our problems, from habitat destruction and pollution to the egregious and common errors of modern medical practice, is a lack of self-efficacy. We don't feed ourselves, don't take care of ourselves, and don't work for ourselves, and more importantly we have little trust in our abilities to do so.

We pay someone else to produce and arrange our food. We pay someone else to set up a workplace. We pay someone else to build our homes. As stated in the last post, this is centralization, where the average person has their power focused on mundane end-tasks (i.e. starting the car, entering the PIN, putting the hop tocket in the microwave, working for The Man for the "privilege" of shelter).

This lack of self-efficacy shows too. It shows in emergency room visits for that crying baby with a fever. It shows in the numerous diagnoses of depression and anxiety. It shows in prison recidivism rates and in our reliance upon government and corporate experts no matter the field, from education to nutrition to love. It shows in substance abuse and relapse. It especially shows in the media coverage of natural disasters. Look at those lost people, waiting for help. Well, most...I'm remembering video from Katrina of the smiling man wading down the street with a LOT of liberated beer floating in tow.

In terms that the profiteers understand, scientific management theory has taken us down a road to the planned obsolesence of the individual. It's not a surprise. The theoretical underpinnings of government monopoly education, the much vocalized desire of the Carnegies and Rockefellers for a plentiful and cheaper (always cheaper no matter how cheap) workforce, the endless stream of technologies seemingly designed to allow us a childhood that extends forever and ever amen...all to make us spectators and consumers, to keep us ignorant to the design.

The desire for robots to cook all our meals and keep the house clean is still palpable. Many of us are waiting for wealthy people to buy them so the price will come down, and the wealthy people opt for the far cheaper immigrant labor.

Your capacity to use the mind, hands, and heart in service to the Self is not profitable to a large degree. This capacity has to be subverted, by instances too numerous and innocuous to count, sandwiched between the history of corporate buyout and destruction of mass transit in American cities and the razing of The Garden in LA, 14 acres of community-grown food, in the name of warehouse space. Sandwiched so tightly the subversion squirts out in every direction. Have a tissue, you got some subversion on your chin.

Doctors say Democrats' Plan offers micro-coverage for macro-costs

Single-payer is the only option for serious reform available. We all know what free market capitalism is about, surely...by now...no? Ok, it's about short-term profit, dividends and investments, and for us common folk it's about manipulation of fear, or problem/reaction/solution as David Icke put it. Now government is riddled with internal contradictions, but in the case of healthcare I much prefered its marginally democratic character to the tyranny of disease profiteers.

For instance, we have choice. I can go to the chiropractor easey as you pleasey, so long as I got the cash. That's the other side to free market capitalism, those with cash have choice, those without can choose public assistance. Since those with cash have choice, as well as political sway, there is little push to cover midwives and home-birthing, acupuncture, herbalists, homeopaths, or chiropractors (though the last profession has gained a marginal reputation in sports). If the system is leveled, privilege of choice stripped from the wealthy, you can be sure that the AMA and Merck would lose status. This is because the state is marginally democratic, sometimes responding to the more liberal desires of the wealthy electorate that aren't fleecing us on this or that particular issue.

There are only two coherent gladiators in the healthcare reform arena, advocates of single-payer and The Diseasecare Industry. Sure there's been numerous plans proposed, but all they really propose, all they have ever proposed, is a continuing devolvement to complexity that looks more like the IRS taxcode. But no matter. The reality ignored across the arena (bleachers included) is the decreasing ability to mobilize the resources which make centralization to such a degree possible. Oil, platinum, iridium, and numerous other substances are being destroyed or converted to an unrecoverable state at a rapid rate (this is not to mention the loss of those "substances" WE rely on, like wetlands, soil, and biodiversity).

So, here's Plan B...oh wait, that's been taken by Medicare. Here's Plan V, one more ignoreable by the two wings of the one business party than the single-payer option. Healthcare accounts for one-sixth of our domestic economy according to Obama. Let's cut the taxpayer funding of the CDC, the NIH, and the other proponents of diseasecare operating on the public dime, and put this money to work researching a blank spot in modern medicine, the effectiveness of close physician-patient relationships and regionally available flora and fauna in treating illnesses using different techniques.

Schools can be established in the land-grant university style to train a new class of physicians in first aid, setting bones, stitching wounds, and the preparation and use of traditional foods as medicine, as well as proper methods for evaluating treatment. They should also receive a well-rounded study in the diagnostic procedures of differing medical cultures. The point here is to remain low-tech and focused on personal relationships with patients.

And just as the land-grants began with a mission to disseminate farming techniques throughout the countryside, these schools should be geared toward spreading the knowledge to the public, not creating another clique of experts with their pay-to-read journal articles.