Never mind that the issue has been used as a springboard for a plethora of others, the fact remains that healthcare in the United States benefits extremely wealthy private companies and that tens of millions of people can’t afford coverage. I’ve been emailed by just under twenty college students in the US over the last month who have all conveyed the same thing – that when it came to choosing between putting money towards the cost of their education or paying for private healthcare coverage they simply couldn’t afford the latter.
As someone that has lived their entire life in a nation that has Universal healthcare, that reality is unbelievable to me. In this country, students actually pay far less because of their status. Like most Canadians, I pay a monthly fee, which, if I’m to be honest, should be higher. I might not know the family up the street, but it’ll be a cold day in hell when I adopt the position that they should be denied healthcare coverage because I’m too greedy to support a system that ensures it. Even more, that I wouldn’t pay double what I do now to ensure it.
Yes, my fear mongering friends to the south, that’s socialized medicine. And do you know what its primary principle is? That even if you don’t know your neighbour you actually give a damn about their wellbeing. It’s that simple. If you want to ignorantly call that Communism, or somehow equate it to the National Socialist movement in Germany in the 30’s, then that’s your right. Everyone, it would seem, has the right to be an idiot. Ironically, that’s something that has been universally covered for some time now.
I’ll certainly not sit here and deny that there are aspects of this country’s system that need reform, but the state of healthcare in this country is by no means remotely close to how it’s depicted by the likes of Fox News and others. I’m not the healthiest guy in the world. I suffer from Type 2 Bipolarity and Sarcoid. I’ve been in and out of hospitals my whole life and I can tell you this – nothing has ever shocked me more than sitting in an emergency room in Los Angeles to see a doctor because of severe bronchitis and looking to my left to find a man with a haphazardly bandaged gunshot wound to his shoulder waiting to receive care.
And I am by no means exaggerating.
Despite the numerous foreign policy faults of his administration, President Dwight Eisenhower often made simple yet astoundingly poignant points – such as how many schools or hospitals could be built for the same price as an aircraft carrier? With the United States militarily occupying two different countries and carrying out other operations all over the world, maybe it’s time the American people seriously started to address the insane magnitude of their annual military budgets rather than complaining about how much the implementation of a just healthcare system will cost.
Just a thought.