Kay -N- Kay

A lot of people are talking about health care reform lately.  Well, not just lately.  We’ve been talking about it for years.  Ok, decades.  In fact, health care has been so screwed since the invention of the insurance company, that our government had to step in and create Medicare back in 1965.

Why?

Why did we… a capitalist society, founded on the premise that so long as there’s a dollar to be made, people will step up to make that dollar in the most efficient manner possible… why did we need a government program to do the same thing that insurance companies could and should be doing?

Insurance companies do not exist to take care of you.  Their commercials may say that you’re in safe hands with them, but taking care of you does not make them money.  In fact… NOT taking care of you is the only thing that does make them money.  You pay premiums to a health insurance company under the premise that when you need health care, you can file a claim so that you won’t have to pay as much money to receive that care.

Premiums = money paid to the health insurance company

Claims = money paid by the health insurance company

Profit = Premiums – Claims

This isn’t rocket science… in fact, it’s not even algebra.  This is first grade addition and subtraction.  The only way a health insurance company stays in business is to get you to pay THEM more money for your health care than they have to pay the doctors, hospitals, etc for your health care. Flat out fact, most people would save huge amounts of money over their lifetime if insurance companies weren’t also profiting from their health care.

So why did we need Medicare?  Old people aren’t profitable.  Sorry guys and gals, you’re health is expensive.  In short… there is no profit in keeping you alive.  Your life is nothing but a loss to insurance companies, so the only one who is interested in keeping you alive is… your government.  They’re the only ones willing to operate at a loss for you.

So here we are in 2009, still talking about how screwed up our health care system is, despite the government subsidizing our most expensive citizens for the past 44 years.   The price that we pay for health insurance premiums has increased at more than double the amount our wages have increased for the past decade.  You pay 78% more now than you did in 2001, which is more than 4 times the amount that your paycheck has increased.  Health insurance companies are making record profits and the World Health Organization rates the USA’s health care at #37 in the world, just behind such leaders in health care as Dominica and Costa Rica.

When your son or daughter gets cancer, do you really want to live in the 37th best country in the world for health care?

…

Barack Obama is on a marketing campaign of town hall meetings, to try and convince the country that the government can help us with health care if we just give them a chance.  In a recent such event in Simpsonville, Republican representative Robert Inglis was fielding questions from the crowd.  A man, evidently sold by Satan Palin on the fact that a national health insurance program, such as what is employed at the #1 ranked country for health care, would result in socialized medicine and “death panels”, stood up to exclaim, “Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare!”

“I had to politely explain that, ‘Actually, sir, your health care is being provided by the government,’ ” Inglis recalled. “But he wasn’t having any of it.”

Gotta love politics.