- Re: Is it possible to read 'Medium' without a google account? Archived Message
Posted by dereklane
on November 29, 2019, 9:50 pm, in reply to "Re: Is it possible to read 'Medium' without a google account?"
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Why — why on earth — would anyone want American style healthcare? You might be wondering why I even ask. After all, American healthcare is one of the modern world’s greatest and most epic failures. It’s such a failure, in fact, that something eerie and weird is happening, unheard of not just in rich countries, but even in poor ones: life expectancy is literally falling…by a year…every year. And it’s not just a failure — it’s a nightmare, that leaves people terrorized, broken, hopeless, and bankrupt. Your money, or your life. And if you don’t have money — you just…die. Americans literally beg each other online for money to pay medical bills by the millions…they cross the border into Canada to buy medicine like insulin…which, by the way, can be a “federal crime”…they have maternal mortality higher than Russia. Capitalist healthcare. LOL. It should be known the world over by now that it’s one of history’s great oxymorons. Not so long ago, Britain had the world’s best healthcare system. Now, though, the surreal, gruesome nightmare of American style healthcare is about to arrive on British shores. What the? Why the hell would anyone want American style healthcare? The story, it turns out, is a sad and weird and gruesome parable of now. The age of proudly self-inflicted catastrophe that we live in. How our societies are drowning by a tidal wave of history’s great vainglorious follies, like nationalism, extremism, fascism — even if it literally kills them. American style healthcare is on its way to Britain thanks to Brexit. Part of the pack of bizarre lies Brexiters sold to the Brits is that they’ll be better off striking “individual trade deals” with “the world” rather than just remaining part of the EU. Now, a wise person might have asked: why would you want to replace French wine and German cars and Italian food with…Chinese ones? Or…even more astonishingly…British healthcare…with American? The answer is: you wouldn’t. Unless, for some reason, you’d lost your senses, and entered into a mass collective delusion. Which is precisely what has happened to Britain. So there Brits are. The poor things. Trying to strike “trade deals” with the “rest of the world” — as a little island nobody really cares much about, versus part of the EU that many Brits now so hate. But replacing the EU with the “rest of the world” really basically just means China and America — nobody else is really a trading bloc of global scale. So for Britain, those “trade deals” means vastly lower quality goods — low-grade chlorinated American meat, Chinese cars— substituting for European food, wine, cars, and so on. Britain’s now a relatively powerless country already trying desperately to strike trade deals with a far more powerful Asia and America — they call it “taking back control” from Europe, ironically —and so the very first thing on the chopping block is healthcare. Why? Because that, my friends, is where capitalism makes a killing. Literally and figuratively. When Britain’s Department of Trade approached America about a “trade deal”, it turns out, something completely unsurprising happened. The very first thing America demanded was “total market access” to British healthcare — in plain English, that means the right to charge Brits the astronomical prices Americans pay for medicine and procedures. Even before any true negotiations for a began. What’s more, guess who’s demanded that? A) The pharmaceutical lobby, and B) the US’s trade chief. So this isn’t just a demand by big business. It’s a formal demand by…the American government. What the? That revelation — America formally wants its hands on our healthcare system — left Brits surprised. They don’t quite understand that America’s been on an ideological mission to spread capitalism by whatever means necessary for the last fifty years and more. By whatever means: that means installing dictators and dropping bombs and starting coups, where necessary. So of course when Britain comes knocking, the very first thing to happen will be the Americanization of it’s economy. Welcome to capitalism, American capitalism style. Only the British aren’t cowboys. (What the Brits don’t understand is that America doesn’t have a “trade policy” — it has an ideological crusade: a mission is to spread global capitalism. Why did I put “trade deals” in quotes above? Because these deals aren’t really made democratically, ie between, say the Chinese people and the American people. On the one hand, the US formally demands whatever mega capital wants — and weaker countries have no choice, really, but to obey. Hence, nations like China can’t really enforce higher labour standards and wages and so forth — even if they want to. America has no interest in that. Why else would it do business with them at all — if it can’t exploit them? That also means that American can’t and won’t support public goods, in any country it does business with, ever, period, full stop. If a nation says, listen, we want your mega corporations to pay their taxes so we can give our people healthcare and education, America tends to laugh. If a nation says, listen, we need to build functioning transport and retirement and childcare systems, we need to give people all those things as conditions of employment…America laughs. They’re not interested in those things. America wants three things from “trade.” One, cheap labour, two, cheap resources, three, the Americanization of an economy, low taxes and no social investment. It couldn’t care less if a society ever develops or matures in any way. It just wants the upper hand.) Do you see my point a little bit? Brits don’t really understand the game they’re playing now. They think that they can strike some kind of nice, gentle, fair “trade deal” with America. But America is already treating Britain just like its treated China and India and Africa. Like a colony of capitalism to be strip-mined. Like a little satellite nation to be Americanized. They don’t understand the only thing America sees when it looks at them now is meat for the capitalist machine. And that brings me back to why Brits are going to get American healthcare, and it’s going to be nightmarish beyond their wildest dreams. American capital needs fresh meat to consume. The average American is now broke. They literally die in debt — which means they never earn, save, or own anything across a lifetime. They are poor people now. What made the average American broke? In large part, healthcare. The cost of capitalist healthcare is so astronomically high that it’s simply driven a whole nation into a weird kind of neo poverty. Your money — or your life. Americans are broke — they have nothing left to give. They’re so broke they’re indebted. They’re done. Capitalism used them up, and now they’re worthless to it — which is precisely why they’ve been abandoned and neglected. So the American capitalist machine needs fresh lives to exploit, and it needs them now. How else are profits going to keep on rising…forever? And along comes Britain, knocking on America’s door. Perfect timing! How much money do you think there is to be made by charging Brits Americans prices — $1K for insulin, $50K for childbirth, $150K for minor operations? The amount of money to be made is staggering. City? County? State? Here’s a whole fresh country (several, in fact) to exploit. Here’s a whole country so…astonishingly…dumb…it’s actually choosing capitalist healthcare. LOL — you can imagine the glee in boardrooms? They’re high-fiving. Brits are giving themselves to the American capitalist machine at the precise moment it needs more lives to exploit so profits keep rising. For the capitalists, it’s a fairy tale come true. Hence, what’s going to happen is something very much like this. One, drug prices will skyrocket — that’s America’s first formal demand, remember, “total market access.” Two, “hedge funds” and Wall St and HMOs will buy up entire chunks of the NHS, because medical care will opened up to “competition” — America’s second formal demand. And private insurance will therefore begin to displace public care, which will cover less and less. Within a decade or less, Brits are going to come to know the full horrors of American healthcare. And I don’t use the term lightly. People having to choose to let themselves, because care is too expensive. People letting that cancer run its course, instead of get chemotherapy, because they’d rather their family keep their home after they’re gone. Private insurance with “deductibles” — most Brits have zero idea what a deductible even is — meaning that you pay the first five or ten or twenty five thousand dollars of “care.” Going bankrupt, just because you went to the emergency room or visited the hospital. Worst of all, having to beg capitalists — and their bureaucratic minions — for medicine and treatment. Literally picking up the phone, calling a profit-seeking corporation that doesn’t give a damn whether you live or die, hearing that they’ve “refused coverage”, and begging them to reconsider. Brits have literally no idea what any of that is like. Zero, none, zilch. They have never experienced anything remotely like it. They can still simply walk down the street to the doctor — even though the NHS is overstretched by decades of deliberate underfunding — and get taken care of. They have no idea — none — what it is to beg capitalism for your life, and be exploited, dehumanized, and commodified, at the moment of your greatest vulnerability. Now, because they have no idea what any of that is like, the story gets even weirder. Compounding this whole mess is the even stranger fact that Brits — many of them, the Brexiters, in particular, literally don’t believe that American healthcare is…as bad it is. They think that people are trying to scare them and bully them. If you teach them the basic facts above, or point out that half of all cancer patients lose their life savings, or that maternal mortality is rising, or any number of other…facts…they go into a kind of weird, bizarre denial. They simply can’t process that — because they have literally no experience of living under such predatory institutions. So they conclude that you must be trying to frighten them. And they react by saying: “bring it on! Don’t you try to scare me!!” That is how American healthcare is coming to Britain. Like I said, it’s a sad, weird, tragic parable of our times. A society literally choosing its own self-destruction. There is no greater failure in the rich world than American healthcare. None. Nothing else causes so much death and despair and waste and ruin — while enriching so many terrible people. Why would anyone choose American healthcare? Now you know the answer. A weird cocktail of hubris, denial, greed, selfishness, stupidity, and hate. The age of self-destruction is upon us. You can see it in climate change, in mass extinction, in a lunatic American president tweeting pics of himself as Rocky. Perhaps, though, you can see it most of all in Brits — many of them, scores of them — cheering on American healthcare, like the very thing that will kill them is their saviour. |