...to see whether it breaks their toes or their skulls.

(Caution: Another rambling essay when I intended maybe 100 words. It's just hard to confine my hatred of for-profit medicine, and the idiots who support it, to a paragraph or two. Read at your own risk.)

When I first began to understand how this extortion racket works -- who gains and who loses -- I figured that any improvements, much less dumping the whole for profit scam and setting up a proper system like civilized countries have, would require that tens of millions of people each have their very own managed care moment.

Gawd knows there are enough outrages to go around. Claims routinely denied for no reason other than "corporate policy." People dropped from a plan, with no prior notification, just because they were costing the bastards too much in claims. Which is to say, the sons of bitches flat refused to do what's supposed to be their jobs -- paying the bills for the people who give them mountains of money every month with the expectation that insurers would uphold their end of the deal. But that's sooooo 19th century.

We no longer expect any individual or company to honor their commitments. In fact, we expect the exact opposite, which is why there are about 15 lawyers for every American these days. Well... maybe not, but breach of contract is the happening thing in courtrooms all across America.

Then there are the armies of insurance company snoops who spend their miserable worthless lives picking through every allegedly private medical record since the subscriber's birth looking for some pre-existing condition that would allow them to void the contract.

If they find anything at all, no matter how medically trivial, not only do they drop this former "member" like a lit cherry bomb, they often sue them for fraud for filling out an "incomplete" application. Didn't know that hangnail or sprained ankle back in 1972 could lead to financial ruin, did you?

But it gets even worse. If the swine win that case, as they do most of the time, they then have legal grounds to deny any and all pending claims.

Time to administer the coup de gras: they may even sue their now impoverished former client to recover every cent the parasites ever paid out the whole time the subscriber was covered by this particular insurance company. In my case, this would be many thousands that I couldn't possibly come up with.

So it's off to bankruptcy court, which isn't much of a deal since people like Obama's VP selection gave away the store to benefit the corporatocracy and, in the process, screwed the peasants yet again. Thanks to bankruptcy "reform," this poor criminal will never have another nickel that isn't already consigned to the insurer's pockets.

And still millions of people continue to take this shit without putting up a fight or even directing their rage where it belongs: executive row, the board room and, worse of all, the bought and paid for members of congress who keep this system alive when it should have died 50 years ago.

But the most amazing thing of all -- at least to me -- is how completely successful the right wing has been in turning a formerly savvy, take-no-shit population into a bunch of ignorant, apathetic, compliant slobs who actually take pride in their own stupidity.

If you're trying to get the public to buy into its own destruction, it's good to prepare them by implementing a covert devolution program specifically designed to reduce them to debt-ridden, chronically broke, scared, dumb, powerless proles. And that's exactly the kind of malleable idiots you want as your target market, the kind who wouldn't recognize class warfare if an arrow made of starched thousand dollar bills embedded itself in their shoulder.

Which is how you produce people like that hopeless fool introduced in the opening post. It's a tribute to how effective corporate propaganda has been, particularly when delivered by cheerful chowderheads in living color on TV, the great disinformation machine of all time.

It's one thing to get people to sit down, shut up and take what they're given. It's another to suck them into supporting status quo corporate malevolence that they enthusiastically applaud their own screwing.

It's like Winston Smith at his moment of ultimate self-betrayal when Orwell tells us that despite his quiet, determined struggle to assert his humanity, Winston has finally learned to love Big Brother.


wp