An average of 60 people are being killed in this country EVERY DAY because they lack access to quality medical care -- 22,000 more of them every damn year, and that number's rising.

That's apparently the price 137,000 people from 2000 through 2006 (with a statistically probable 44,000 more the past two years) this society has decided is OK, as long as we don't have to give up our slavish obeisance to the non-existent free market.

That's the price we're willing to pay to keep our greedy Friedman-esque economic philosophers and their selfish acolytes well fed, stylishly dressed and comfortably housed so they can spend their time arguing the modern equivalent of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin on the Sunday morning pundit pap shows.

Meanwhile, "advanced" countries have put that nonsense far, far behind and simply dealt with this question pragmatically -- without the boat anchor of so-called free-market ideology chained to their ankles and dragging them under:

Health care is either a right or a privilege: Ultimately, that’s the central question regarding any efforts at health care reform.

Most of the rest of the world has decided in favor of the former. Thus far, the US has taken the latter position. It’s up to us, the tens of millions of individuals most affected by this hideous, malevolent, soulless system, to force our representatives to obey their constituents. Because other than a few gutsy people like Kucinich and Sanders -- even Conyers, who actually sponsored HR 676, the single-payer bill that keeps getting rejected year after year -- Congress certainly isn’t going to do this on its own.

After all, when has altruism ever been a property of governments, particularly when so many of our alleged representatives are so well paid by the health care racketeers to look the other way.

Will we continue to squander huge sums of money on a scam that is legally and systematically incapable of providing decent health care for all? Or will we follow the lead of every single other industrialized country – and quite a few who aren’t even close to industrialization – and create a fair, universal access, single-payer system that doesn’t limit its services to those with the fattest wallets while excluding those who often need its services the most?


sf