Sunday, June 21, 2009

Healthcare Bondage? The Uninsured as Chattel Slaves

You know the debate over universal healthcare has gotten pretty polarized when hardline netroots blogs start agitating for a new war of secession. That's right. Check out Glenn Smith at Firedoglake, "Slavery and the Health Care Crisis":


The gravity of America's health care crisis is the moral equivalent of the 19th Century's bloody conflict over slavery. This is not hyperbole, though the truth of it is often lost in abstract talk of insurance company profits, treatment costs, and other cold, inhuman analyses.

Today's health system condemns 50 million Americans to ill health and death while guaranteeing health care to the economic privileged. It cannot stand.

About
18,000 Americans die each year because they lack health insurance. That's more than a third the number of lives lost in battle during each year of the four-year Civil War.


Members of Congress without the moral clarity to recognize this equivalence will be condemned by history. Their spinelessness and lack of will when confronted with the power of the insurance industry is just as morally bankrupt as the American congressmen who bowed to Southern slave-owners.

The morally compromising efforts to pass health care reform that insurance companies might like is as insane as the compromises over slavery. Those compromises -- the First and Second Missouri Compromises of 1820, their repeal by the Kansas-Nebraska act of 1854, and the notorious Dred Scott decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857 led to the War Between the States.

War is what happens when morality is sacrificed to political expediency. The stupid compromises over slavery ducked the fundamental moral question at hand. The compromises were doomed to fail, as all such moral cowardice ultimately fails. That's no original thought. It's a central message of authentic Judaism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. In fact, those traditions only bought blood and trouble for themselves when they forgot this fundamental teaching about moral courage ...

Condemning Americans to premature death and ill health so some can earn profits is the moral equivalent of slavery.

Boy, that's a doozy! Read the rest here (via Memeorandum).

I guess if
cooked polling data isn't enough (health reform may be dead this year), leftists can always raise the specter of a March to the Sea to crush the hegemonic private-insurance oppressor class!

Image Credit:
Michelle Malkin.

4 comments:

dave in boca said...

I'm hyperventilating over this vapid young POTUS's non-response to the Iranian debacle & obvious intent to talk with the Mullahs "when it's all over." Of course, Obama doesn't realize that Israel and The Great Satan will be blamed for the crimes of those he wants to convert with soothing words.

This is all a preface to my observation that Obama is using the same cooked poll numbers, counting an imaginary number of [illegal alien, young & healthy] uncovered health types as fit to be covered by his all-embracing hugs. Just like with the Mullahs, he thinks people will respond to his soothing charm.

The FireDogLake chief blogress is doing a film/book on methamphetamines and methinks from some of that group's posting, there's some sampling of the study material going on around their meetings. Pretty much froth-mouth hyperbole from people who are obviously toking/snorting something I'd like to get my hands on. No needles, pls, however! Straightlining is a libtard habit when it comes to strong comparisons with the Civil War!

jacksmith said...

AMERICA’S NATIONAL HEALTHCARE EMERGENCY!

It’s official. America and the World are now in a GLOBAL PANDEMIC. A World EPIDEMIC with potential catastrophic consequences for ALL of the American people. The first PANDEMIC in 41 years. And WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES will have to face this PANDEMIC with the 37th worst quality of healthcare in the developed World.

STAND READY AMERICA TO SEIZE CONTROL OF YOUR NATIONAL HEALTHCARE SYSTEM.

We spend over twice as much of our GDP on healthcare as any other country in the World. And Individual American spend about ten times as much out of pocket on healthcare as any other people in the World. All because of GREED! And the PRIVATE FOR PROFIT healthcare system in America.

And while all this is going on, some members of congress seem mostly concern about how to protect the corporate PROFITS! of our GREED DRIVEN, PRIVATE FOR PROFIT NATIONAL DISGRACE. A PRIVATE FOR PROFIT DISGRACE that is in fact, totally valueless to the public health. And a detriment to national security, public safety, and the public health.

Progressive democrats and others should stand firm in their demand for a robust public option for all Americans, with all of the minimum requirements progressive democrats demanded. If congress can not pass a robust public option with at least 51 votes and all robust minimum requirements, congress should immediately move to scrap healthcare reform and demand that President Obama declare a state of NATIONAL HEALTHCARE EMERGENCY! Seizing and replacing all PRIVATE FOR PROFIT health insurance plans with the immediate implementation of National Healthcare for all Americans under the provisions of HR676 (A Single-payer National Healthcare Plan For All).

Coverage can begin immediately through our current medicare system. With immediate expansion through recruitment of displaced workers from the canceled private sector insurance industry. Funding can also begin immediately by substitution of payroll deductions for private insurance plans with payroll deductions for the national healthcare plan. This is what the vast majority of the American people want. And this is what all objective experts unanimously agree would be the best, and most cost effective for the American people and our economy.

In Mexico on average people who received medical care for A-H1N1 (Swine Flu) with in 3 days survived. People who did not receive medical care until 7 days or more died. This has been the same results in the US. But 50 million Americans don’t even have any healthcare coverage. And at least 200 million of you with insurance could not get in to see your private insurance plans doctors in 2 or 3 days, even if your life depended on it. WHICH IT DOES!

Contact congress and your representatives NOW! AND SPREAD THE WORD!

God Bless You

Jacksmith – WORKING CLASS

Greywolfe said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Greywolfe said...

(Sorry, previous attempt had too many typos. Had to try again.)

Oh where to start... First, the idiot that wrote that piece of garbage has no education in American History, just a Cliff Notes version of Liberal propaganda. The War of Northern Aggression, (a much more descriptive and accurate term than "The Civil War") Was fought over states' rights, not slavery.

Next, if we were losing 18,000 people per year due to non-coverage then, why aren't they throwing a hissy fit over the 36,000 people that die anually (on average. According to CDC numbers) from influenza? Or the 32,000 that died in auto accidents?

Let's just assume (yes I know the addage about assuming things) that the blithering idiot Glenn Smith's numbers are correct. The number of people that died because of insurance is still minute compared to other causes of death.

I mean, can't they jump on some other non-socialist bandwagon that could actually save lives in a more productive manner? Oops, I forgot, the operative term was socialist. That's the real motivation, here.