Sick and Wrong (Rolling Stone Magazine)

How Washington is screwing up health care reform – and why it may take a revolt to fix it

Let's start with the obvious: America has not only the worst but the dumbest health care system in the developed world. It's become a black leprosy eating away at the American experiment — a bureaucracy so insipid and mean and illogical that even our darkest criminal minds wouldn't be equal to dreaming it up on purpose.

The system doesn't work for anyone. It cheats patients and leaves them to die, denies insurance to 47 million Americans, forces hospitals to spend billions haggling over claims, and systematically bleeds and harasses doctors with the specter of catastrophic litigation. Even as a mechanism for delivering bonuses to insurance-company fat cats, it's a miserable failure: Greedy insurance bosses who spent a generation denying preventive care to patients now see their profits sapped by millions of customers who enter the system only when they're sick with incurably expensive illnesses.

The cost of all of this to society, in illness and death and lost productivity and a soaring federal deficit and plain old anxiety and anger, is incalculable — and that's the good news. The bad news is our failed health care system won't get fixed, because it exists entirely within the confines of yet another failed system: the political entity known as the United States of America.

We might look back on this summer someday and think of it as the moment when our government lost us for good. It was that bad.

Read the full article (7 pages worth)
www.rollingstone.com...

Interesting perspective and review of the health care boondoggle.
The author raises many interesting points and questions.

Is a revolution really the answer?

reply to post by warrenb


I posted this in another thread, and I planned on starting a new thread with all the flyers I connected from the 9/12 Tea Party movements, but I loved this idea from one of the speakers:

"All 50 states should secede from this Union and form a new one! Leave the idiots in Washington, DC to figure out how they are going to repay the trillions in debt that they have accumulated!"

Would I be correct in assuming that the health-insurance racket currently under the microscope in the US has its spiritual home in Israel .. or at least that the aforementioned health-care fat-cats are dual-citizenship Israelis who of course prefer to have homes in the US and UK ?