America, You Sicken Me

Private health insurers would throw your baby in front of a car if it saved them a nickel and they knew they could get away with it.

Despite the government caving in to the private health insurance industry’s every whim, they are still slaughtering children by denying coverage and care for kids who have “pre-existing conditions.”

These are kids, not adults who let themselves go and allowed their lifestyles to shorten their life span through years of neglect. Some are even infants. If you can explain to me how a newborn even has a pre-existing condition, I would love to hear it.

The bottom line is this: insurers make money by denying coverage. That is their biggest source of profit, and they hire people whose sole job it is to scour your medical records for loopholes that allow them to not do their job.

They’re also in the business of making sure anyone who is sick and was dropped from coverage will never be insured again, because no one wants to take responsibility for a person who actually has medical bills to pay.

Sarah Palin and her fellow Retardicans warned people that the government would institute death panels, and yet it’s not the government who is choosing who lives and dies: it’s private insurers. It always has been, and it always will be until we take that power away from them. Whether or not you get medical care is at the sole discretion of people who will profit from not providing it for you.

America is the only industrialized nation without public healthcare. We have the lowest life expectancy of any industrialized nation, we spend more on our health care than any other nation, and we get the worst healthcare for the steep cost. I am sick and tired of living in a medically third-world nation.

I don’t care if you think “big government” is the enemy. I don’t care if you think everything the government does fails. Here are the facts: private insurance is not working, public healthcare has worked everywhere that it has been implemented, and the only people in America who are benefitting from the current system are those in the insurance industry.

I am sick of listening to conservative bullshit rhetoric that is spewed without a shred of acknowledgment for the facts. I am sick of people who are insured now brushing all of this off as if it were nothing, because they’re insured now and healthy. I am sick of those same people acting surprised at the first sign of illness when their insurance drops them and they become one of the millions of people who file for bankruptcy due to medical bills (the #1 cause of bankruptcy is health care expenses, which accounts for over half of all filings in the US).

Quit being stupid. Quit ignoring the empirical facts. Get off your ideological high horse and acknowledge that the private health insurance industry is killing Americans, and the only thing that will fix it is providing public care for all Americans, without the threat of dropped coverage.