1worker1vote.org Healthcare for All
Leadership by example is a prized military trait with the idea being that leading from behind will not inspire front line sacrifices required to win. “Do as I say but not as I do” usually becomes a non-sequitur in a functioning democracy or successful battlefield.
A plutocracy offers one level of healthcare to the benefit of already privileged, elected public “servants” who then can vote to deprive their constituents of access to similar coverage. Such separate and unequal accommodation reeks with hypocrisy and is undergirded by bias towards racial and widening economic class differences. America’s actuarial tables provide the “dying proof” of a best possible healthcare system that only money can buy.
Basic universal healthcare coverage remains one of America’s most unnerving and unnecessary inequalities starting with life and death differences in access, cost and service according to zip code. Healthcare historically offered to members of the U.S. Congress through the bipartisan-supported “Federal Employees Health Benefits Program” remains the nation’s gold standard that, like Washington, D.C.’s public museums, is viewed on the outside of a rope line or glass case protected from possible contamination by visitors.
Perhaps the most egregious sin committed by the Obama Administration’s Affordable Healthcare Act (ACA) was to repurpose “FEHB” into the concept of public-access healthcare exchanges. Subsequently, healthcare has become a decisive Gettysburg showdown, “a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
Starting with hedging on the unalienable right to full “preexisting conditions” coverage, the United States risks deepening its divide into a few gated community healthcare “haves” surrounded by seas of healthcare “have-nots.” It takes a late-night television comic to talk sorrowed truth to arrogant power about the “reality pay-to-play democracy” that America has become where an insurance industry dollar equals a congressional vote and where corporate personhood can negotiate lower healthcare rates and better access than the country’s unincorporated masses.