deva wrote:It is easy to create a far better health care system but the wealthy institutions ripping the people off blind will not allow it
Who or what do you think the wealthy institutions
are exactly? Is it Skynet? Godzilla? A fat white guy sitting at a boardroom table with a Magic "Marcellus Wallace" briefcase making everything happen?
I hear these types of anti-establishment arguments "for" the "people" and "against"... well I'm not sure
who it's against really, it's always so elusive. If the so-called "wealthy institutions" are not "the people" then who or what exactly are they?
The point is, these "institutions" you speak of are comprised of people and there are goals and ideas that they work towards. Just the same way anyone who works in just about any job works with others towards some goal. Maybe the goal is to make a shitload of money, maybe it's to shelter homeless people. Who will stand up to say they are some "God" and have the moral authority to say which is better, or in a more extreme sense, which takes priority? You? Go ahead, but I pray to nothing.
So your problem isn't some big bad monster corporation-y thing, but
other human beings and their goals. To dehumanize them is to water down your argument with irrelevant fluff. It's the same with the right-wing who rage against "the government." Well who or what the hell is "the government?" That's right, a bunch of
people (hopefully) working toward the goal of doing the things the Constitution says the government is supposed to (yeah right).
No, I'm afraid the "problem" is the species itself. Start there. You may have a good point, but you sufficiently dull that point with the anti-establishment rhetoric.
And to leave deva alone for a bit and get even more serious, I believe that it is absolutely reasonable to argue that health care as a state provided service is a constitutionally enforceable mandate on the government. The Preamble to the U. S. Constitution states that part of the role of the government is to "provide for the common defense [and] promote the general welfare." I'd say that health care could reasonably be found to fall within the scope of that mandate.
However, don't get too excited hippies, because if we conclude that health care is mandatory from that statement, then we must reasonably conclude that military defense be mandatory as well. Both equally important and necessary elements needed to
keep the people safe. Safe from bullets as well as bacteria.
Now of course neither of the ideological extremes want to concede that both mandates are legitimate. If we could at least come to that same conclusion then we could probably focus on the "hows" a lot more efficiently.
But that will never happen because, again, we're humans. We're our own worst enemy.