really about -- transferring money from the U.S. Treasury to Halliburton and others in the defense and intelligence industries.

The American people have allowed the hijacking of our government by the banks and the defense industry. They just use us as long as we make money for them. After that, we are expendable.

We paid into Social Security, but the money was stolen mostly by the Bush administration. As for Medicare, we also paid into that.

Medicare costs exceed what my generation paid. The reason is that we not only paid Medicare taxes for future care during our working years, but we (or our employers) also bought health insurance for care during our working years. The money we paid for insurance coverage when we were young and healthy went to the health insurance companies, their shareholders and CEOs.

If the money paid to insurance companies for the care of younger and more likely healthy people along with what is left in the Medicare pot was placed into a pool from which health care for all ages including the very oldest among us was paid, then we would be able to cover not only pre-natal services but also nursing home care for the very elderly and helpless.

Our economy is, as to essential services, inefficiently organized. That's the problem. That is why we pay so much more for health care here in the U.S. than other countries pay. And that is why so many of our outcomes are not as good as those in other countries. The insurance companies have no stake in providing preventive health care to the young. The expensive illnesses that begin in our youth are neither diagnosed nor prevented, and thus care in our later years is much more expensive.

The obesity in our nation is an example of this problem. Only now that we are starting to talk about universal coverage, is the rampant obesity, including much morbid obesity really being discusssed. As long as the health insurance companies could make a higher profit by ignoring the problem which causes serious conditions like diabetes and heart condition that become apparent as a person ages, they ignored it.

The reason that nothing is done about the inefficiency is that guys like Bernanke, the bankers, the CEOs of health insurance companies and much of our business community, earn huge amounts of money from the inefficiencies.

If the mathematicians who work on Wall Street were working, let's say, in the field of biology and trying to use their skills to help find better ways to treat diabetes, cancer and heart disease, instead of to invent derivatives if advertising executives spent more of their time to sell healthy life styles and less to sell fast food, our medical costs might be a lot lower by now.

Our economic system is archaic. Capitalism is not the problem. It is what we have done to it that is the problem. The idea of capitalism is that those who offer useful services and products profit. Enter the advertising industry and the manipulation of our beliefs and feelings about our desires -- and voila -- we have a perversion of capitalism. The rewards go to the very people who offer destructive services and products. Why? Because the big money is in selling nothing for something, not the other way around.