I've known people who've died as a result of our cruel and inhumane health care system. My friend's father lost his wife to diabetes. He spent all his money and lost his house paying her medical bills. One Christmas Eve, while living in his son's basement, he blew his brains out with a gun. I used to work as a musician. One Saturday a band I was in opened for someone. I had lunch with their banjo player. Playing banjo is not the most lucrative profession, and when this banjo player had chest pains, he thought about the tens of thousands of dollars the ER would cost him. The next day he was dead.
I listen to people like Biden and Mayor Pete, and I think of Obama. He was going to get Americans health care. To his credit, a lot of Americans who never had it now do. My daughter can now stay under my policy until she's 26. This is a great step, but not enough. We still have Americans going bankrupt over catastrophic medical emergency. If Canada can do better, if the United Kingdom and the European Union can do better, why can't we, the richest country in the history of the world do better as well?
Even if you have good insurance, you can have issues. My father fought in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. Toward the end of his life, he had to divest himself of much of what he had, and look into Medicaid for long term care. That is unconscionable, and it could happen to any of us. Medicare, as now constituted, doesn't cover that. The NYSUT insurance, which I bought, covers some of it, but certainly won't cover all of it if you really need it.
We have young people, some of whom we work with, up to their ears in college debt. Some despair and commit suicide. Some took credit cards at brightly colored displays at their colleges, got a free water canister, and worked up even more debt. In non-third-world countries elsewhere, these things are taken care of. I have a friend from Germany who went to medical school. He tells me it cost only a few hundred dollars and that his father had to pay that.
The United States has bare naked capitalism for those of us on the outside, but practices socialism for those who least need it. It's obscene that the man from Chase, to which we gave billions, can lecture us on the evils of socialism. Donald Trump, who pissed away billions in giveaways to his rich BFFs, cries we will never be socialist. Yet he boasts of how he avoids paying taxes.
Hillary Clinton was the great "centrist" hope. She said we'd never get universal health care. She said if we had free college it would pay from Trump's kids. She offered status quo, very much like what the current batch of "centrists" are offering. We need a candidate who offers something Trump does not. We need a candidate who will wake up the four million Obama voters who stayed home during Hillary's run. We need someone who will inspire even more Americans to get off their asses and vote for a President who isn't insane, and a blue Senate.
For my money that's Bernie Sanders. Stop lecturing me about frigging George McGovern. In fact, McGovern was absolutely right. Vietnam was a disaster, and we'd have been better off if we'd gotten out sooner. Wake up and smell Donald Trump, because he is exactly what we get when we run a "centrist."
Bernie Sanders for President, 2020.
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