Djelloul Marbrook

The only thing keeping us from becoming a federal police state is our
nostalgia for the ideals of our founders and the need to pretend that
we’re still living up to them.

Perhaps I’ve figured out why we clumsily call it a health care system. It’s because it exists to take care of the health care industry. Otherwise we might more felicitously call it patient care. The way it is now, the patient is so named for patience while being screwed.

If it’s true that people get the society they deserve, we have nothing to complain about, because we have been electing politicians who tell us there’s nothing wrong with our system or all it needs is a little tweaking. In other words, we have amply demonstrated that
we prefer their lies and sellout to industry to our own truths.

The truth, for me, is that no one deserves the system we have. Everyone on earth deserves a patient care system driven by human compassion not greed. But our particular disgrace as Americans is that we have the voting power to do something about it, unlike many people, and we prefer to elect liars and corruptors.

We have a system that every day tells us to go to hell, die younger, live sicker, buy drugs we don’t need and struggle to pay for drugs we do need. Is it our fault? It is at least as much our fault as it is that of
the liars and cheats whom we elect and whom we allow to abuse us.

Even when the World Health Organization tells us that our health system ranks thirty-seventh in the world and yet is the most costly, we believe the liars who tell us it’s the best while stuffing their own pockets with bribes from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.

We must, at some point, decide whether our country exists for the corporations and their political stooges or whether it exists to protect the ideals of our forefathers and our common good.—DM