Healthy Americans

I'm not sure what the Healthy Americans Act is, but this is the kind of policy ad I'd like to see more of. Too funny.



And this definitely gets the point across and in a funny way. But it really is sad. My mother-in-law wanted to move here to Texas to be closer to us before she died of cancer, but couldn't because she had a pre-existing condition and her husband would have lost his health insurance if he quit his job. And so that pre-existing condition, which was one of the reasons she wanted to be closer to us, prevented her from doing so. And the only time she could ever see my wife or her grandkids was the few times we could travel across half the country to see her. And that's just too typical.

But even this shouldn't be an issue. Why are employers in the healthcare business? It made sense as an extra perk back in the day, but health insurance is now considered a necessity. And for as much as some people without health insurance just end up dying, most of them will still get the care they needed, but belatedly and at a greater expense to everyone. So employers have these exploding insurance expenses (which many of their foreign competitors don't have), employees are stuck in crappy jobs they'd rather leave (which betrays Free Market Principles), and society ends up paying more for crappier service. That's just wrong.

And why? Because health insurance companies know they've got a good racket and don't want to give it up. No matter how much they pay out, they know they can always just charge more the next year and there's no risk in this at all. They're now just middlemen who we pay to process paperwork. This isn't insurance; this is extortion. Plus, conservatives, who have no earthly idea how the Free Market really works or how our health system works, are trained to attack anyone who mentions a sensible solution. So here we are, resorting to humor ads to sell no-brainer policies.

Of course, we shouldn't be trapped into jobs in order to say healthy. Of course, good health is important to our society. Yet here we are, fighting against no-brained ignorance in an attempt to give every American a basic necessity of life. I'm not sure why conservatives insist on making life here crappy, but I assume it's got something to do with lapel pins and loyalty oaths.