The high cost of living

That's "living" as in "living and breathing."

There used to be a comedian on TV, many years ago, who (in a skit) called the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare on the phone. He said into the receiver, "Hi, George, how's your health?...Good, because we've only got enough money for your education and welfare." I feel like I'm living in that joke.

According to a recent report from the Department of Health and Human Servces, Medicaid spending is expected to grow at a much faster pace than the economy is expected to grow.

Why am I alarmed by this? Maybe because I am fifty years old and in poor health, and as poor as dirt. I am kept alive by Medicaid. I take ten different drugs daily to manage my heart, my cholesterol, my blood pressure and my diabetes. I see at least one doctor every week for something or other, and they expect to be paid. My hearing aids, my orthopedic shoes, my drugs, and my diabetes supplies are all paid for by Medicaid. My insulin alone would cost me a hundred bucks a month if I had to pay for it out of my own pocket. Without some sort of medical coverage, and right now Medicaid is all there is, I slowly die.

So perhaps I'm not the best person to comment on this. Perhaps I can't be objective. Perhaps my views on this matter cannot be trusted by the averege taxpayer.

(This is where the long pagraph that I cut should have gone; the one about how the average taxpayer hasn't had to go through what I go through. Of course they haven't had to go through all of this. I hope they never do. Nothing would make me happier than if not one more person in this nation (or in this world) had to take a dime of public assistance for their anything, let alone for health care. Hell, I can dream, can't I?)

If Medicaid continues to grow faster than the economy, Medicaid will be unable to continue to provide health care services for those without any other option. If that happens, a replacement will have to be found and I mean soon. What sort of replacement is the question.

(And why, you ask, would we have to find a replacement? Well we don't...not if you're OK with a lot of people dropping dead because of poverty. Here we'd sit, still one of the richest nations in the world, with our people dying from being poor. Are you OK with that? I'm not.)

Obama and McCain both have plans that address the problem to varying degrees, but I can't recommend either since they both leave control of the system in the hands of the people who have messed it up to begin with, be they the government or the health care industry. I don't trust them to solve the problem they've created.

Fully socialized medicine is one option, but it's one that is anathema to most Americans. (I think it's mostly that word socialized. Maybe we could call it something else?) Nearly every industrialized nation on Earth has some sort of "National Health" and it's true that they've all got their problems, but try this: ask someone from a country with a National Health system, say Canada or the UK for example, if they'd trade their system for ours. I don't think you'd find anyone who'd trade their National Health system for the mess we have.

From everything I can see, National Health works better for everyone except the doctors (and, of course, the business people who manage medical programs without having gone through the unnecessary step of medical school). Like most of us, doctors want to be rich. Not to say that they won't still be very well off; they're doing well up in Canada and over in the UK and they're not suffering or going hungry, though they may have to drive BMW's instead of Bentleys.

But you'll never get any kind of National Health through in America, because it wouldn't let doctors and "managers" make as much money as they want. That's the American way, after all; anything else would be socialism. Better dead than red, as they say.

I fear that, one day, that may actually be the choice we face.

The Blues Viking

The opinions here expressed are mine and if you don’t like them you can get your own damn blog.