New Health Care Ad: If Dick Cheney Didn’t Have Government Care, ‚Äö√Ñ√≤He’d Probably Be Dead Now’
Nurses’ Health-Care Ad Takes Aim at Cheney
“The patient’s history and prognosis were grim: four heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery, angioplasty, an implanted defibrillator and now an emergency procedure to treat an irregular heartbeat,” the ad states, referencing Cheney’s lengthy medical chart. “For millions of Americans, this might be a death sentence. For the vice president, it was just another medical treatment. And it cost him very little.”
If you or I had the sort of medical history Dick Cheney does, no doubt we’d have long since bought the farm. Of course, Cheney isn’t exactly like you or me. As Vice President, he gets the best quality health care known to man for virtually nothing. No expense is spared, no test denied, and no cost controls are placed upon the taks of maintaining Cheney’s health. This, of course, begs the question: If high government officials can have their health care paid for by the government, why can’t the rest of us? If we can waste billions in Iraq, why can’t we develop and fund a single-payer health care system? I ask these questions knowing full well what the answer is, of course. It’s all about the Benjamins. Our health care system has become so enthralled with the free market, that the lives of virtually every (insured) American is in the hands of Humana, Kaiser Permanente, and other for-profit health care companies. In far too many cases these companies are far more concerned with quarterly profits and their stock price than they are with the lives and health of the Americans they insure.
No reasonable person with even a shred of decency and humanity could agree that our current health care system is fair and equitable. To call it a class-based system doesn’t begin to do justice to the inequities inherent in a system that judges your health care worthiness based on the balance in your bank account. Those who have can expect doctors and health care providers to fall all over themselves to provide the highest standard of state-of-the-art care available. Those who don’t can, to paraphrase a famous Dick Cheney quote, “go (&^% themselves”. Many Americans, though, can’t afford the condoms necessary to protect themselves while they do that.
I can understand why some might argue against a single-payer system based on economic or ideological terms, and there can be no arguing that a free-market-based system promotes innovation and spurs research. I’m not about to say that the current system is all bad. Nonetheless, when millions of Americans are uninsured, can ANY reasonable person claim that the system works for ALL Americans? If some Americans live in fear of illness or injury because they cannot afford health insurance, all of us are poorer for it. Of course, when you’re receiving the highest standard of care imaginable, I suppose it’s difficult to keep in mind that this isn’t a universal right and not everyone is getting the same thing you are.
In the most powerful economy in the world, health care should be readily available to ALL Americans, regardless of the contents of their wallets or purses. Quality, affordable health care should be a right, not a privilege. To acquiesce to a system that falls short of this is to recognize that some Americans are more equal than others, which is something I find reprehensible.
Yes, I know that those on the Right, if they’re even paying attention to what I’m saysing, will deride this as advocating socialism. If that’s how you choose to label it, I’m good with that, because it doesn’t change the reality that even the poorest among us deserve quality, affordable health care. If we cannot provide that most basic of rights for all Americans, then we lose any moral claim to superiority…unless, of course, your claim to superiority is based on our unquestioned ability to bomb any country back to the Stone Age.
