Albatross' Blurty

Health Care Reform Screed

A British acquaintance wrote to complain that Britain's public health service was being libelled by U. S. media, such as the Investors Business Daily article claiming that if Stephen Hawking had to depend on the British Health Service he would have died long ago. (Apparently unknown to the journalistic stawlarts at IBD is that Hawking is a British citizen, and has survived all these years on that exact care.) Here's my reply:

Economic nationalism and bigotry are being used by American corporate media in their all-out propaganda offensive to prevent any reform to health insurance in the United States. In such an environment, complaints that the British Health Service is being slandered will never be aired, much less elicit any empathy.

While more than two-thirds of Americans desire such reform, much more than two thirds of our Congress has been bribed, I'm sorry, "lobbied" by the health care industry to ensure no such thing occurs. The population knows it. We know that the supposedly brilliant Obama has somehow managed to repeat the first term gaffes of the Clinton administration by recklessly and naively attempting to tackle the health care industry without laying sufficient Congressional groundwork. In other words, we're quite aware that we are being lied to and that our representatives have been bought, so your average American is rather more concerned about how to pay their medical bills (and, incidentally, the destruction of our representative democracy) than about the hurt feelings of our British and Canadian neighbors.

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