The USA Needs Universal, Single Payer Healthcare

Here's a post from Al Stefanelli from his blog of the same name -- please follow link to original.

I think our "Galtian Overlords", the Rand Pauls, and other heartless @77$*%#^, those rich folks who CURRENTLY do not have to worry about healthcare, food, or shelter, are overstepping their bounds.

It's time to TRY to become America again - if that's still possible
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Why I don’t care about your money

I am not an economist, I am not a political scientist. I don’t have all the answers and I don’t claim to have all the answers. I do know that on October 1941, the UK Minister of Health Ernest Brown announced that the Government proposed to ensure that there was a comprehensive hospital service available to everyone in need of it, and that local authorities would be responsible for providing it. This was the birth of the NHS in the UK. It was not popular at first, but if you ask almost anyone in the UK about their NHS, they will tell you that they wouldn’t give it up for all the tea in China. The claims by the GOP that the NHS is some horrible program that is bankrupting the UK and that most people don’t get the care they need is total and complete bullshit propaganda. I know enough people in the UK that love their NHS.

The thing is, dear readers, every time I make a comment about universal, single-payer healthcare for the USA, the very first responses I hear from the GOP, members of the Tea Party Movement, Libertarians and the like are always about money. Either we can’t afford it or that it is robbing the rich to pay for the poor. I find this morally reprehensible.

Until we make a decision to put the health of human beings over the almighty dollar we will never conquer this problem. I am not making my comments from a political point of view, from a religious point of view or from an economic point of view. I am making my comments out of my basic, evolutionary instinct for survival. Like many people in our country, my illnesses are incurable and degenerative. As well, like many people in my country, if I had access to proper medical care, my life expectancy would span about another twenty years. Without it, I will not see fifty, and I will be 48 next week.

Facing a painful, slow death does not engender in me one ounce of sympathy for those who would put money ahead of my life. I cannot bring myself to give a flying fuck through a rolling donut about someone who is making a six-figure salary bitching about another 10% added to their taxes to pay for universal healthcare.

When those of you who are healthy and financially secure end up sick with no cure for what you have, unable to work, facing a year before you can get Social Security benefits, two years plus before you can get Medicare (which is shit), making steady trips to the pawn shop selling everything you own just to eat and keep your lights on, watching the repo man put your only means of transportation on their tow truck and have to tell your children there will be no birthday presents and end up staring in the face of a very uncertain future that includes not being able to afford the medication that will allow you to live, then I will very interested in what your take on an NHS for the USA is.

Those of you who put a dollar ahead of the health and life of one of your fellow human beings cannot imagine the immensity of the fuck I do not give about your wallet.