Monday, September 21, 2009

Brief thought on the current healthcare debate

The one thing that is not being discussed, indeed everyone avoids this core aspect like the plague, is the essential class based character of the problem.
Oddly enough, that stalwart pragmatist, Mike Dukakis gets close to the class aspect of the issue whenever he goes on the Jeff Santos Show to discuss health care but other than that pfft!
You'd think the government was proposing to hand out new white wall tires to everyone the way the debate has been framed.
Of course this is the USA and we like to believe that class divisions don't really exist here, even if the data suggests otherwise. So it is natural if somewhat irrational to frame the debate without a class context.
This hamstrings advocates for health care reform unduly sez Humble Elias.
Frankly we'd do better to simply assert freely that that thirty million of our fellow citizens are either bankrupt from the current health care system or else too poor to buy effective insurance, healthcare is an anti-povery measure and ought to be framed as such explicitly.

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