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It’s beyond every bit of reasoning and logic we have that we not only don’t give people what they need to stay alive but we won’t
According to the World Health Organization, 45,000 Americans die each year due to lack of, access to, or financial inability to afford health care. I suppose it would then be safe to say that tens if not hundreds of thousands of people also die globally each year due to lack of health care or the means by which to procure it as well. In so much as this statistic fairly demands, I’ve already allowed for education, income, poverty, access, socio-habitual reasons, and other generics like smoking, addiction, and obesity. Does that move you? Whether it’s a woman, a child, an orphan, or a millionaire, the statistic has again already accounted for it. But how do we as a people, as humans, as citizens, as leaders, as brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters nationally and globally account for this? Maybe I’m asking the wrong people and the wrong questions.
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With all of the world’s industrial, intellectual, medical, technological, socio-cultural advancements,’ and progress we have made since the Stone Ages, don’t you find it ironic that the barter system and slave trade in it’s most barbaric and archaic form has returned to once again dictate how much our lives are worth. Bartering whether for people, spices, foods, or trade goods was of course the road by which the world old and new traveled upon as they came to know each other as neighbors, enemies, and cultures. To be sure, this is how the world grew. And to think of all the wealth we as a country and a global community have accumulated only goes to show you that when it comes to the preservation of the species, the many varying cultures, and their respective communities, every thing has its price. Allowing that then, it shouldn’t surprise us that when it comes to life in this very day and age, much is still the same in the ancient sense since we still demand a price to some degree for someone’s life. My meaning being, we still charge people to allow them to live very much like the ancients did when they put a value on a slave’s life in regards to whether he would be traded, sold, worked to death, studded, or prized.
True is this little anecdotal apercu even as insensitive you may think this analogy be. Whatever it may be you nevertheless probably recognize this to be true should you or any member of your family be in malady, or so close to the end. Be it they’re in pain, discomfort, distress, or moribund, the fact is, should they fall ill or victim to a curable ailment, whether or not they will live for an extra hour, day, year, or a decade is measured solely by the monetary scales of value. Not by God’s hand as we would think but by the hands of another all mighty god, The Dollar. So with this said, I ask what matter is dirty paper when these people, you’re family, my friends can see one more sunset, one more smile, or one more birthday with the aid of Asclepius’s caduceus. Even for me now with my own mortality in question due to an incurable genetic curse, I too only have so much longer to live due my inability to pay for such a treatment that will spare my life. In any event so as not to digress, we move on.
Such are things in life as time is merely an abstraction solely measured by man’s insistence on logic and reason. A byproduct if you will of our incapability to do just that. This being the case then, how does one respond to this. Knowing that time will eventually run out! How doe I respond to this? By doing nothing less than living each day like it’s the last minute of my life as I know it could very well be. But that’s beside the point. Not every one thinks like I do. These matters of my health I won’t go into any further other than tell you with all negation aside that I’m dying. Verily as I live with an illness that statistically takes its hosts at the ages of thirty five to forty I ask myself how much is my life worth sometimes as I watch Congress, the Elitists, every medical C.E.O., and the so called Humanitarians determine for me how much my life is worth? Ultimately, whether I’ve the right to it or am grossly mistaken in my accusations, I vehemently blame their greed on my inability to procure treatment like those so many others who unfortunately learned first hand what the formers greed cost them.
What complete hypocrisy it is as I often marvel watching all the celebrity and supposed non-profit organizations raise money for cures and for the cost of treatments for millions of people around the world when we all know that if it wasn’t for our addiction to money and all the pleasures it can buy, that if they wanted to, the powers that be could easily facilitate the treatment for prolonging many a million more peoples lives. The people who don’t have access to it financially like me or by what ever other means that keeps it from them. Yes, as you critics know nothing more than the art of smoke laden sophistry, alongside your use of polemics and the politics you argue with, it is a fact of life that we are born and we die. But in opposition to their weak arguments I must profess by rhetoric, if we can put people on the moon and cure syphilis for all the politicians to continue their whore-mongering, surely we can prolong life and the quality of such thereof without bankrupting the world as they say.
How do we do that then! They fiercely retort. Sallying back at their rhetoric, we all have the answers to those questions of which I’ll ask again. How much is a man’s life worth? Who decides whether someone lives a longer and more fruitful life than the one who decidedly dies an agonizing and painful death? Nobody likes answering questions like these to be sure. For this requires responsibility and accountability. None of which anybody at least in the position to answer this question will take such accountability to answer. Sadly, it’s become all too Un-American to be accountable and responsible to anyone other than yourself. So I better go with something that makes a statement instead so as not to discompose the establishment. This way you and your conscience won’t have to bother participating either. As usual!
What I want to know is why is it with all of the wealth and the medical prowess we have accrued from our past, medical costs and health care is so unreachably and unattainably expensive for so many people in the world. To be quite selfish I should say for so many people in
Let me try from another angle. Health care is a for-profit institution is it not. And Boy! How they profit. And profit, and profit, and profit! So what? So what are we to do, punish them? No! They’ve earned it. It’s theirs. And to suggest anything less would be socialistic or communistic. And in no way do I mean to punish those successful individuals and companies who have spent a lifetime working, educating themselves, and sacrificing they and their families to the better health of the world. No, I don’t mean to punish them by taxing them out of their ambition, for it saves lives. However, don’t assume I’m granting them immunity or impunity from this pseudo-invective rebuke either. In no way do I mean to take what they’ve earned due to their contributions to the global health organizations and said businesses’ by practicing a socialistic agenda like that of our current Fuhrer Obama and his Fourth Reich. Where we take money from those with the education and wherewithal to earn these salaries and give it to everybody who owns a blue ribbon for coming in last place.
But who I do mean to take all this from is from all those individuals who think the government is a free bank who has money to spend at our expense. Money that for decades has been loaned, pillaged, stolen, and embezzled! This money which belongs to us taxpayers who in good faith have given it to our government in trust, which has now been given to all the grafting C.E.O.’s, organizations, companies, governmental, and bureaucratic agencies so they can what? Keep the cost of health care astronomically high, unreachable, and for the most part unattainable! It’s a weak argument I know but my lack of insurance has left me an effete valetudinarian.
In a perfect world someday without these bank robbers and insurance companies that keep us enfettered in chains made of maladies we could perhaps live to see another day. With all that this implies and the amounts of money at stake, we both painfully know this will never happen. And to strive to achieve this we won’t because we as Americans have not the conviction anymore for the execution of ideas or commitment we once had. And why do they keep these prices so exorbitant I ask. Because they can! Period! I don’t have to be educated beyond my high school G.E.D. diploma to know this and please, please don’t embarrass us both by denying my laicized assessment.
As we have been told, the high costs are due mainly to research and development, marketing, and administrative expenses. Justifying these expenses as a way to excuse their dereliction as they repeatedly pound media and print ad messages into our heads that keep reminding us we’re all just pill popping junkies who need their medicines for diseases and maladies we don’t have. They’ve got it backwards see. Instead of keeping their marketing expenses down thereby keeping the costs of health care and medicines relatively lower for treatments we do need, they instead spend billions on messages to convince us all that we need medicines for illness we don’t have. Hence, all those commercials that ask us if this hurts or that hurts must go. And the more repetitive their campaigns, the sicker we all get. If you tell me my left foot itches enough when I don’t even feel the itch, sooner or later I’m going to feel it psychosomatically. And that’s a fact. It’s these marketing blitzes that are costing these drug companies billions and billions of misspent and misappropriated dollars for agendas that keeping us all sick as well as the cost of health care and medicine high. This along with the rampant blackmail by insurance companies and privatized health care less I forget. And what about their lobbyists too! It’s them who are keeping us addicted by pimping us their insidious ideas such as how great our life would be without all the little ails that bother us, or without the chronic diarrhea if we could just somehow buy that little pill they hold hostage until their ransom is paid. It’s like the band-aid they keep slapping on us all the while pacifying us by telling us the stitches cost too much money to use on us. But maybe some day we’ll get sewed up if we can just scrape up that thirty-three thousand dollars or qualify.
But that’s not the case at all and we know it. If you were to ask me for reasons and explanations of why these sutures are so expensive, therein unattainable by most, my cynicism would tell you the costs they argue are all just synonyms for Payola, Lobbyists, Political Campaign Contributions, and Expense Accounts which are nothing but more indiscriminate forms of payola to themselves, the executives, the politicians, their friends, and cronies alike.
Of course, I know when you break it all down I’m sure there are significant and important reasons why research and development, marketing and administrative costs are so high. Why the costs of medical procedures and medicines are so high. But we don’t care!! We just don’t care, we want relief. What do we care if they profited a little less to keep more of us alive! What we care about is living another day. So go back to your mansions and come up with more reasons to explain why that dying man over there that has no name doesn’t have access to what only few do. Tell him why you mark up medicine simply because you can so as to demand the highest price. In this naïve and quite myopic way of my seeing things, no doubt you’re saying, “you don’t have a clue!” Then give me one! Give me a clue so at to understand all your unabashed and selfless philanthropy. Help us understand the process by which you reason. Schmuck!
Perhaps I should inquire about something all together much closer to their hearts. About something that’s perhaps none of my business! What else do you need that you already don’t have? How bigger must your house with twenty rooms be so as to keep prices that high so as to deny malaria pills to the “poverty stricken areas which you donate millions to each year” to ease your conscience. How bigger must the bonuses be rather than help every single person in this country with the simplest of basic care. The answer they offer our nosiness, “that’s mine and that money to cure has to come from somewhere.” Well maybe they can get it from the same place they get all their private donations and bacon wrapped projects they waste billions on each year. How much would it really cost to produce the medicines that we need and the equipment to detect sickness? The same as ammunition and tanks I wonder. Imagine all of the lives that could have been saved if we could have just shaved a few zeros off of what we’ve already spent on both the wars we are currently fighting. So many zeros in those figures they spent I can’t even begin to understand what “trillions of dollars” actually are.
Why be bitter I say to myself. Why waste the time and energy. In the end, we’ve all had a hard life. You and I aren’t special, but for some reason these doctors, all the medical lobbyists, and drug and insurance companies seem to think they are. They think that they can put a price on life and play God with the game of supply and demand in regards their medicinal inventories and manufacturing capacities. Tell me how much it would cost to put a smile on the face of an eight year old little girl who doesn’t want Santa to bring her a doll for Christmas. She wants him to make the pain stop. She wants him to make the pain go away instead. She wants Santa to tell God to take away her mommy’s tears. As you sit there disregarding her and thinking about you’re golden parachute and how much you’re going to spend on the biggest bash in the Hampton’s history, how many people just died because of you and your greed. While you were just thinking of what suit to wear to your bash, how many people were just diagnosed with a relatively curable disease that will no doubt lead to terminality. All because what, they simply couldn’t afford the price of treatment. Or was it perhaps because of some bureaucratic red tape, or because they either couldn’t afford health insurance, or were uninsurable.
For the most part we’re all ill equipped when it comes to playing God. Not when it comes to building idols but when it comes to playing God. For us it’s something well never understand. It’s just life and in a lot of cases pain that we’ll have to endure for a little while longer. So who’s worthy of being saved. How do you qualify to become one of the rarefied few who can afford that million dollar surgery, that six hundred dollar inoculation, or that two hundred and fifty thousand dollar a year enzyme replacement therapy at Mount Sinai. Do you qualify or is it up to the Chosen One’s to decide. Be well informed my friend, the Chosen Ones aren’t choosing anybody except the highest bidder. So bid higher lest you become sicker!