Social divisions behind America’s Health Policies and Politics

As founding editor of Modern Health Talk, I write about health policies and the politics that affect them, but that’s not how I started. With altruistic motives and no source of income, I started this website in 2011 to share my unique perspectives and help seniors live independently as long as possible, but over time my interests turned to politics. Writing about the future of healthcare policy and technologies, I learned that fixing our broken and perversely expensive“sick care” system depends on fixing our broken politics, and getting big money out.

But there’s another underlying problem to address. It’s the social divisions that keep us from understanding each other or even trying to. That’s why I today share thoughts derived from @TheFarmerJones.

Americans are generally Clueless

Americans seem to be the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. They know next to nothing about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past. And they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions within words like “socialism” and “capitalism.”

Chiefly, what Americans have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than to the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions. This is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy (or democratic socialism) can elicit on these shores.

An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete. They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone to irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth. Meanwhile, they pay morein tax (when one figures in federal, state, local, and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country their taxes do not cover).

One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services. But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose.

Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich an overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy?

Related Articles on this site:

• Why American Healthcare is Soo Expensive – It starts with the profit motive and the effective returns from political lobbying.
• AMERICA BROKEN: critiquing Capitalism, Healthcare & Politics – Since these three topics are related, the article addresses each, with a closing section on How to Fix the Corrupted System.
• Extreme Inequality in Politics, Healthcare and Economics – Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Wayne Caswell is a retired IBM technologist, futurist, market strategist, consumer advocate, sleep economist, and founding editor of Modern Health Talk. With international leadership experience developing wireless networks, sensors, and smart home technologies, he’s advocated for Big Broadband and fiber-to-the-home while also enjoying success lobbying for consumers. He considers himself independent, but leans left to support progressive policies. (contact & BIO)