THINK WE CAN .com

Some readers here are aware that I have 45 years of experience in the health insurance industry.

Drawing from that experience, starting in early 2008 I conducted five months of in-depth research on the issue of health care reform.  The results of my work can be found in my 11,000 word paper titled “Health Care Reform” on my website, ThinkWeCan.com.

That rather lengthy document should give most readers a substantially deeper understanding of this issue.  But, in this short column, I will share the most important and critical discovery I made.  Comprehensive health care reform is our absolute necessity for two simple reasons—compassion and mathematics, for if we fail to reform this, the largest economic segment of our society, fully 1/3 of our citizens will remain at extreme risk of ill health or death, and the U.S. will soon be bankrupt.

By the time you read these words, one of the most important speeches in the history of the United States will have been delivered to the world.  And by now, our new President, Barack Obama, after speaking on health care reform, will have been vilified and mocked by a large number of our media and certain politicians who are so ignorant and/or greedy as to defy description.

They will toss about one-liners such as “pulling the plug on granny” or “creating death panels” or “turning the U.S socialist or communist.”  Directed by their superiors, or health care industry lobbyists, or because of an abject failure to understand this issue, these misguided people will be doing their best to bring our President to his knees.  They use health care reform as some sort of game, some little play toy issue used to advance their agendas while strutting their bold carelessness concerning the health of the most vulnerable members of our society.  Let us hope it is ignorance which propels them, for if not, the only conclusion is that they are devoid of compassion for the 100 million Americans who now suffer at the hands of privatized, U.S. Corporate Health Care.

By our 40 year failure to control our privatized health care system we are consuming our children, who, of course, are the future of our country.  And all the while, our anti-health care reform crusaders charge forth, seemingly without a care in the world, proclaiming their obscenely harmful accusations to anyone who will listen.

How can they further deny the tens of thousands of veterans that suffer post-traumatic stress syndrome who are now, or will soon be, homeless without adequate healthcare to assist them?  How can they further deny the many millions of our children incorrectly diagnosed onto mood altering or anti-psychotic drugs by our medical and pharmaceutical industries?  How can they further deny the tens of millions of our hard-working citizens who simply don’t earn enough to afford health insurance?  How can they further deny the millions of homeless families, including hundreds of thousands of children, proper health care?  How can they further deny the millions of desperate parents who know they have no hope of securing proper care for their sick or injured children?  How can they further deny the fact that we allowed our children’s obesity-driven diabetes problems to become our most serious epidemic?

And if all of that fails to muster any compassion out of Corporate Health Care America, let us turn to the mathematics of this issue.  After 40 years of allowing our privatized health care industry to brutalize 1/3 of America’s citizens, the grim reality we are all facing is that if we don’t enact proper health care reform, this nation’s economy will implode.

Through the application of 3rd grade math, it has been absolutely proven that if we do not stop the 1.2 TRILLION dollars that is now being stolen from our health care system, YEARLY, to be compounded by the 70 million Americans soon to be covered by Medicare, we are dead men walking.

In other words, we have no intelligent choice but to enact comprehensive Health Care Reform, and as soon as possible.  We were fooled before by the Harry and Louise TV ads. And here we are, once again, being slicked by the very same grotesquely greedy industries that will bankrupt this country if we allow it.  Are we stupid?

Conversely, think about this.  It has been said it will cost more than a trillion dollars to fund U.S. health care reform over the next 10 years.  Good grief, that much is being stolen every single year from our health care system.  In other words, we can fund everything we need, and more, by simply taking back the control of this massive part of our economy that should never have been handed over to big business in the first place.

Sound too good to be true?  Well, the 59 source references in my research paper are impeccable.  Harvard University, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Department of Defense, The World Health Organization, Boston University’s School of Public Health, The Veteran’s Administration and The Comptroller General of The United States can’t all be wrong.

If we don’t get health care reform right, it will be impossible to regain our once exalted economic position in the world.   What is more frightening is the fact that if we do not solve this problem, if we are that morally bankrupt, how do we think we will solve any of our other serious problems?  We are in grave financial danger.  This could be, and should be, the method whereby we begin America’s long trek back to the greatness we once enjoyed.

Health Care Reform is, indeed, the seminal principle of the United States of America.