Get Big Business Out of Health Care

The United States "health care" system is a national disgrace. Two changes in the current "Privatized For Profit" mess would guarantee a fair and just system of health care for everyone from womb to tomb.

First...insurance companies must be totally excluded from the health care system. Insurance companies must not be allowed to insure people capitalizing on health problems to reap enormous profits. Insurance companies must be restricted exclusively to insuring property, not people.

The United States "health care" system is a national disgrace. Two changes in the current "Privatized For Profit" mess would guarantee a fair and just system of health care for everyone from womb to tomb.

First...insurance companies must be totally excluded from the health care system. Insurance companies must not be allowed to insure people capitalizing on health problems to reap enormous profits. Insurance companies must be restricted exclusively to insuring property, not people.

Second...pharmaceutical companies must be nationalized. No more obscene profits for Big Pharma.

Some of the obvious advantages to this plan include the following:

1. Health care would be available to everyone not just the wealthy, the politicians and people fortunate enough to have insurance.

2. People would not lose their homes and be forced into bankruptcy because they are unable to pay exorbitant costs of catastrophic long-term illness or injury.

3. Corporations would lose a major bargaining chip in their efforts to bust unions by manipulating and controlling health benefits.

4. Veterans would receive medical care in their own communities rather than traveling long distances to veterans' facilities. Soldiers would no longer be stockpiled away from friends and family in privatized hell holes like Walter Reed Hospital.

5. Politicians would no longer be owned and operated by insurance companies and Big Pharma.

The argument against this proposal, of course, is that such a plan smacks of socialism. Bush used that excuse recently when he chose to veto medical coverage for poor children.

My response to that charge is that the U.S. already has socialism for the rich in the form of tax cuts and write-offs, subsidies, corporate bailouts and other taxpayer-funded programs to fatten the hogs feeding at the public trough. Capitalism with its "dog-eat-dog" credo is for the masses who should not ask what the government can do for them but what can they do for the rich.

Sue Bastian, Bend