Wealth IV - Health Care

My health care policy amounts to this: stay healthy. I eat reasonably well part of the year, the rest of the year I maintain a garden, and I bike or walk most of the time I travel. I suppose if something bad should happen, Medicaid would cover part of it, as I have about $5000 dollars and no job. My father might, if the cost wasn't too great. I don't spend much time thinking about it. I'm too busy living.

Recently we passed a Health Care bill requiring everybody in America to have health insurance. Very lucrative in the short term for insurance companies (and creating a vastly larger and ever-less informed army of corpra-crats), but a bill which did absolutely nothing about the two greatest underlying health problems in America: Government/Corporate policy that assures the worst, most unhealthy food is the cheapest and most readily available; Government/Corporate/Social policy that allows the soil, the air and the water to be poisoned with more than 100,000 different kinds of man made chemicals, without any cost to the poisoner, but his or her share of what falls back on all of us. A Health Care bill to stimulate the economy even as that economy is rigged to make people sick. Genius.

Conservatives hate the bill. It is exceptionally lucrative in the short term, but long term, it's harder to maintain 12% growth or better annually. They are afraid the bill will make it more expensive for them to receive the most expensive Health Care, if everybody has access to it. And fundamentally, secretly, they bristle at the idea of giving platinum Health Care to someone who is not contributing significantly to the economy. I will remind them, in any hierarchical system, it's not a good idea to make the foundation sick. Sooner or later, they figure it out. And if they don't, the whole damn pyramid falls.

Democrats tend to be oblivious. They seem only to understand the spending of money, even if that "money" is only credit.

And really, what does either party know about health, fiscal or otherwise? The Boomer generation is about to retire. I'm aware there is an obligation to elders, but I didn't agree to a 15 trillion dollar debt. That is expecting a lot from a generation that is smaller in number than yours. At the rate you've been charging, I half-expect the debt to be 25 trillion by the time the last Boomer retires. I don't know about my fellow Gen Xer's and the Millennials, but I have little interest in living captive to Boomer interest payments, and Boomer Health Care, particularly if that means we have to accelerate the rate at which we pollute the biosphere and deplete its resources by turning those finite resources into toxic garbage.

In reality, Boomers, the rate at which the Earth's resources have been depleted, the age of the boom has come to an end. Except maybe more of those kind that are delusion, which increase the debt and weaken the economy. Besides that, declining oil doesn't bode well for the ease of your retirement.

As for universal Health Care, it is a noble goal. Delusion though, if we expect to give all Americans, indeed, all the world's people, the kind of Health Care Americans have come to expect. The point cannot be to provide Platinum health care to everybody, but to attack the underlying reasons for ill-health, which are related to the underlying reasons for the ill-health of the entire Earth, which is the human notion that all the material of Earth is just dumb matter to be exploited, that Homo sapien sapien somehow exists outside the biosphere, that we can continue to break the most fundamental Law of Ecology - let nothing go to waste - and the second most fundamental Law, that you don't shit in the water supply.

There is a prophecy abroad, that we are on the verge of the sixth Great Extinction. Homo sapien sapien is industrializing beyond the capacity of the biosphere to maintain growth as we have come to perceive it. If we continue to look at the world as we do, and not as it is - a dynamic, wildly differentiated reflection of the energy of the Creator, an inconceivably intricate web on which the existence of Homo sapien sapien depends - then we will continue to exploit the biosphere until we kill it, at which point it will not sustain Homo sapien sapien, or very few of us living a very mean life.

Again, you can't poison the base of the pyramid and expect the pyramid to stand.