I See Dead People — Why Don’t They?

I’ve been watching the news for a while now, and it doesn’t look good. For whatever reasons, we have elected people that want to kill us. The President wants to “overthrow Obamacare”. A majority of the House of Representatives want to “repeal and replace” Obamacare. Apparently, some group of Senators (who are also in the majority party) want to do the same and they will be showing us their handiwork on Thursday, then attempting to push it through quickly and get  the President to sign it.

All of this, as duly elected officials, is their right. The majority party can do that when they hold Congress and the Executive Branch. In theory, the Senate could blow us all away with the best-crafted healthcare-for-all bill the world has ever seen. If they do that, the nation will breathe a collective sigh of relief and the celebrations will commence. The problem with that, of course, is that we can only predict based on past actions and stated intents. The House version of this bill was horrible enough, with 24 million people predicted to lose their healthcare. They went back and made it more draconian, more punishing, more deadly — so that it would pass.

Now, the Senate version takes up the cause, and they are doing it behind closed doors, with no one but 12 people having worked on it. Given the party-in-charge’s previous plans and celebrations, I don’t hold out a lot of hope for this mysterious piece of legislation.

But this not a political decision, between “liberal snowflakes” and “conservative realists” as it is being painted by the press (especially Fox News) or between competing ideologies (as the rest of the press seems to think). It is a moral decision. If whatever comes out of the Senate Republicans takes away health coverage from anybody, it means earlier loss of life than with healthcare coverage for that person. Contrary to what that Congressman said, people do “die because of lack of healthcare coverage”. 

Do you know what they call people without healthcare? Dead or poor. The reason Obama made it a priority is because so many of the bankruptcy cases involved medical bills.  Returning to the pre-Obamacare era is dumb economically, but it is lethal as well. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe we need to accept that death happens. But as a society, don’t we have the collective will to limit that? That’s what Obamacare taught us: that we can save people, if we want to. This Senate doesn’t seem to want to. Isn’t preventing suffering a good thing? Isn’t that our call as human beings — to take care of each other?

I’m not a big one for hyperbole, but isn’t the early death of 23 million people a form of genocide? While it’s a lot harder to prove neglect, we recognize that it is wrong, and that it is a form of violence. Writing a law that says some of us require neglect of others is inhuman. I have given up on figuring out who is at fault — doctors and the medical establishment or insurance companies and their rules or Big Pharma for soaking us for meds. At this point none of that matters. Those who have made things worse have already done so. For any other body — especially one of elected representatives — to plan the illness and destruction of millions of lives is something super-villains do in the comics. It has no place in real life. 

If this bill does anything like it appears it will, anyone who votes for it should never be re-elected. Not ever! Still, that makes it about politics again. Anyone who votes for this — again, if it is what it seems — should not he allowed to represent humanity. 

I keep seeing dead people as the direct result of this bill. If you’re ok with that, you’re dead already. I don’t know what to say after that.

I’ll be…

Resisting with peace,
John