9.22.09
After so many thousands of years wandering the plains and living in huts out under open air, we have returned to the caves.
We build impossibly steep mountains and hole up in them; Stack our spaces one on top the other.
We keep out wind, rain, animals, air and even our old friend fire. Ghosts of Bon hide in flourescents, cheap incandescence; nothing to warm our darkness but the feeble zapping buzz of micro waves.
We dream of blue spark cinders--the dying of a distant flame. Only a long since memory long lost forgot. Whispers of smoke rising.
So I Might Get a lot of Flack for this...
But I think it's a valid point.
"...Every half-hour.
That’s how often someone dies in America because of a lack of insurance, according to a study by a branch of the National Academy of Sciences. Over a year, that amounts to 18,000 American deaths.
That’s how often someone dies in America because of a lack of insurance, according to a study by a branch of the National Academy of Sciences. Over a year, that amounts to 18,000 American deaths.
After Al Qaeda killed nearly 3,000 Americans, eight years ago on Friday, we went to war and spent hundreds of billions of dollars ensuring that this would not happen again. Yet every two months, that many people die because of our failure to provide universal insurance — and yet many members of Congress want us to do nothing?"
That's a quote from Nick Kristof's latest editorial in the New York Times. Which you can find here in it's entirety.
Here's another gem, this one from Roger Cohen, also of the Times:
"France spends
11 percent
of its gross domestic product on health care
and insures everyone
and the United States spends
16.5 percent
of G.D.P. and leaves
20 percent of adults under 65 uninsured.
The numbers don’t lie: The U.S. system is wasteful and unjust."
The bottom line: If we were as efficient as France when it comes to health care spending, we could be saving 4% of our GDP and providing healthcare for everyone at the same time.
Now 4% may not seem like a lot, but that actually ends up being the yearly cost of our military.
So we could actually DOUBLE the size of our armed forces with those savings if we wanted to.
OR we could DOUBLE the pay for all of our dedicated men and women in the armed forces.
Now that sounds like something even a conservative could get excited about!
OR
We could continue to leave 1 out of every 5 americans without the medical attention they deserve while wasting a chunk of our national budget large enough to run the military.
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