Notes from a Cassandra

I know that everyone (except the wingnuts) is celebrating the passage of this "landmark" health insurance bill, and without wanting to sound like a merchant of gloom on a sunny day, I really wish someone would explain to me how forcing people to buy a for-profit product doesn't scare the bejesus out of you. Personally, it really freaks me out.

What also freaks me out is the tea partiers yelling about socialized medicine and how the end has come. The end perhaps has come, but how did they miss the part about NO PUBLIC OPTION? The only thing socialized about this bill, maybe, is the expansion of medicaid to now include the 32 million people who make under $29,000 a year per family ($14,000 for individuals). That is a step in the right direction, but for the rest of us who have to contend with the PRIVATE insurance companies, very little is going to change for the better. It is still up to their discretion how and when they pay out - this, my friends, is the very nature of private insurance. Call me a Cassandra, but I predict that even the pre-existing clause will fall short as the insurance companies raise premiums - which they will have to do in order to stay in business. I go back to my analogy of a car in a war zone: the goal of a private company is to make a profit. They are not charities with hearts of gold and have never claimed to be.

I've been introspecting a lot lately, in particular I've been trying to understand why this bill really gets my goat - what do I care, I'm covered and now more people will be covered too, so really, what is my problem?

My problem, in a nutshell, is big business. And when big business marries big government, I really think we're in for something so dire it's not even possible to foresee. It's like when they repealed the Glass-Steagall Act. At the time it was just a few wizened critics who could see what this meant. The rest had turned their usual blind eye and relegated the responsibility of giving a damn to those who really don't give a damn. To me, this is the Glass-Steagall of healthcare. We'll see the results in about ten years.

But there's more. As the world is owned by fewer and fewer bigger and bigger corporations, we are silently losing our rights to a healthy, peaceful life. What's happening in the food industry with Monsanto patenting seeds could mean that down the line they own the right to every grain that's grown. It's happening with water, where natural resources are being privatized and sold at exorbitant rates. It's already happened with education, where the expense of private education has forced the majority of students graduating every year into enormous debt, leading them to then join sectors that feed this machine of greed and foster an uncaring, materialistic mass of people.

Perhaps I am idealistic, but it makes me terribly sad. The forests are being sold for oil or cattle grazing, the water has become a sludge-fest of pollutants, our clothes are being made in Chinese sweatshops, they're constructing ugly buildings everywhere... and I haven't even got to the part about the military-industrial complex.

I really wonder how these events will begin to unravel. The Cassandra in me once again predicts the following: an Iran-Israel war which will involve the US and turn into some sort of WW III. The Tea Partiers will ramp up their already insane "revolution" and either a third party will start to form, or the country will be further divided among party lines leading perhaps to a civil war or just a lot of riots. There will be mass starvation because of problems within the food industry (perhaps the suicide gene will spread and kill all forms of seed life, more cattle disease, the possibilities are endless). I don't know about peak oil, per se, but there will be an oil crisis (probably deriving from the next middle-eastern war, or WWIII).

But of course, Cassandra was mad.