Romney sweats as he tries to roll out his pre-programmed message about health care to patrons of the Red Arrow diner in Manchester, New Hampshire, and a waitress behind the counter wasn't having any of it. Via the WaPo:
[video of waitress and Mitt talking]
One of the things I'm proud of doing in my state is putting on track a plan that gets everybody health insurance," Romney began, seeing an opening for his standard stump speech about his efforts as governor of Massachusetts.
But Griffin was in no mood for platitudes, and interrupted.
"After we pay our huge deductibles for our insurance and our cost for our prescriptions, there's nothing left," she said.
"Are you a Massachusetts resident?" Romney asked.
"No I'm a New Hampshire resident," Griffin said, and then added, before Romney could jump in, that "we pay over $1,000 a month for our insurance. Then we have co pays. Every time you go to the doctor, it's $50 a visit. Then you have co-pays for our prescriptions. Can you tell me what your co pay is?"
"Yes," Romney said. "$10 for each prescription."
"That's very nice isn't it?" Griffin answered dryly.
"Yes. What are yours? Romney asked.
"Mine are like $30-$50. I have three sick children."
There's plenty more of the exchange.
http://www.americablog.com/2007/08/mitt-gets-roughed-up-on-health-care-by.html
All change in the healthcare system by politicians seems to lay in coming up with a new way of bundling more money around the grotesque creature that it has become. All Americans ought to be cognizant of the fact that this industry has become foulfully corrupt. When I try to metaphorize in a single image the industry, I think of that disgusting floating guy in Dune who finally descends upon the innocent and pulls his plug. I get the same sensation when I watch an ordinary American who finally becomes totally submerged in hc/insurance debt, after having done nothing more wrong that becoming infirm.
No money available can fix it this way, not by feeding yet more money into its maws.
Instead, and this is the sane approach, REFORM the healthcare system.
Take the filching by other industries out of the equation, and I doubt any new money would have to be manifested at all.
I certainly am not talking about any government establishment here, except for the FDA, which is simply a shill for the pharmas and the AMA, or any legislation and bureaus dealing with insurance oversight. I am instead talking about the corporations which have corrupted it so.
I cannot wait to see Michael Moore's (did you see prissy Mitt dissing Michael Moore in the diner?) movie, which essenially exaggerates or inaccurately reflects nothing about the corruption in the hc industry.
Like the brunt of Moore's documentaries, they are responsibly whistle-blowing and informative, and all deal with information that you should get everyday from other sources, but do not. He throws out exposure after exposure, and we have become so bolluxed to the facts that they seem surreal, and then when system agents like Romney make sarcastic and derisive slurs, we tend to end up thoroughly perplexed, which is exactly where politicians and advertisers have always wanted us.
Imagine, in the first place, anybody out there making documentaries of a whistle-blowing nature in this day and age in America. 'No thinking, thank you, we are watching Gilligan and all the other superficial sitcoms, and we choose to believe the advertisers and spinners.' There is an axiom somewhere that discusses us getting what we deserve.
Do not let your sneering neighbors or family dissuade you from seeing this salient documentary.
All of this complexity in the business of American medicine cries for clarity, and please tell me why when a doctor checks you out, and then is forced to go into the next room and has to call the insurance company for permission to ply his art and craft, he/she should be so personally and professionally insulted? The only way for a doctor in America to escape this moral dilemma is to have stock in the insurance companies, or simply has a hole where their conscience should be. But most, being decent docs, suffer. But these kind of narcissists are made, not born, and usually the most efficient way to kill a moral is to drown it in money.
But the insurance company is not the only whore in the bed. Because the healthcare industry has set its profitting at such immensely obscene levels, the insurance companies slouched in, the only players in town, other than doctors and insurance executives, to actually be able to pay the prices. The only apt word is 'scam.' Lower the prices and put tar and feathers on the insurance companies, and run them the fuck out of town.
When you couple the corruption of the healthcare industry caused by insurance companies with the corruption of victims of hurricanes, droughts, etc.(because only a dwindling number now actually get paid what they signed up for and paid for every month of their lives), you have a case for stern and meaningful oversight, or perhaps divestiture.
In the Chinese language, where the word 'insurance' comes from, the word for 'insurance' and 'extortion' are the same. Insurance has never been clean--that is why they drape everything in red, white and blue and posture themselves like a Norman Rockwell painting.
