Imagine waking up with chest pain, or getting hit by a drunk driver, or being diagnosed with cancer–and also still having to worry about whether your boss will still employ you next week so you can afford to stay alive.
Welcome to the great U S of A! Where your right to life is tied to your productivity.
We’ve normalized a system where healthcare is a perk, not a right. Like a company-branded tote bag or pizza in the breakroom. Need insulin to live? Better hope your employer hasn’t “restructured.” Broke your leg? You better not be unemployed–or you’ll be crawling to the E.R. and then into debt.
It’s cartoonishly dystopian when you think about it. We don’t tie firefighters to employment status. If your house is on fire, they don’t ask if you have a job before putting it out. But if your body is actually on fucking fire? Well, if you don’t have employer-sponsored insurance then best of fucking luck to you!
It’s also a massive scam. Tying healthcare to employment keeps people terrified of quitting, terrified of organizing, and terrified of speaking out. It’s wage-slavery dressed in HR-approved language. “We’re like a family” they’ll say. I’ve heard that one a few times in my life at work. Sure, a family that charges you $600 a month to maybe see a doctor if you’re lucky.
And don’t get me started on COBRA, the cruel joke of a system where you can keep your insurance after being laid off–by paying both your premium and the employer’s. As if anyone newly unemployed has a few extra grand lying around for monthly premiums. That’s not a bridge, it’s a toll road to bankruptcy.
Other countries keep healthcare as a basic human right. The USA treats it like a prize you can earn for being useful to capitalism.
Sick? Get a job. Too sick to work? Die quietly.
Let’s stop pretending this is normal. Let’s stop congratulating companies for offering healthcare, as if that makes them moral. The bare minimum shouldn’t feel like a gift.
Healthcare shouldn’t be a reward for surviving capitalism.
It should be a fucking right.
Sisyphus Shrugged 
Civilised countries pay to help the most vulnerable or most unlucky citizens. And also people who aren’t even from that society who fall ill or are injured. It happens all over Europe and elsewhere. A majority of those people, including many conservatives, believe in such a humane level of social responsibility.
But the Number one country in the world, Merica, doesn’t believe in decency, humanity, mercy.
It just believes in the Almighty Dolla.
Well, its dumb evangelists, its dumb mormons, its dumb milk-rabid Penny Dutch, its dumb Cuban refugees, its dumb Hispanics et al, appear to believe in the moral values of the super rich. ie no fucking moral values at all.
But it does make sense. If America is going to have an incompetent president. It should obviously have a man-child retard like Kennedy in charge of health. Quarter of a million extra dead because of Trump’s Covid fuck ups not enough for yah, lets bring back syphillis, tuberculosis and the Black Death, and make sure that every Republican pastor makes his flock flock to their local church and rub shoulders with their fellow county folk for optimum spreadage.
America is not a country. Its an asylum.
But those who are mentally distorted in it are not given care.
Instead
They are voted into positions of power.
I didn’t know you were bi-polar K. But you write so well. Maybe two minds are better than one. Because you seem very rational, and “on it” these days.
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I’m of the opinion that Civilised – like the word Democracy is more a thesis than a fact, we just aren’t that evolved to make those concepts work in a practical or sustainable way. Look at how quickly we fall to the rubbish that the right chant?
Are the rest of our countries much different, or not headed down the same path. The thing is most of our media comes from the USA, our shadow oligarchs take notes from theirs, I’m sure you have those – we do.
The state as it’s evolved int he west is a series of carrots dangled in front of us to keep us consuming and poor – this example – Health insurance is one of the worst. The cures, the treatments, aid and comfort are there for the sick – but you have to be a slave for us to get them says the insurance company.
How is all of this anything but an extension of feudalism, our lords let us work their land for the rations, that may or may not see us thorough the winter, for that we fight wars for them, serve them, pay half our crops to them and they have the pick of us. God agrees with them, they dictate what is true and what isn’t. Truth is a manufactured consumable.
Remember in 1984 when O’Brian says to Winston while he is torturing him – “How many fingers am I holding up?” It’s exactly that – how many our overlords say.
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“If America is going to have an incompetent president. It should obviously have a man-child retard like Kennedy in charge of health. Quarter of a million extra dead because of Trump’s Covid fuck ups not enough for yah, lets bring back syphillis, tuberculosis and the Black Death…”
But hey, Oak … at least they won’t have autism and that’s what we’re apparently really fighting and are afraid of in this country. I stopped following someone on Instagram because she and her husband are adopting and said they won’t be vaccinating their child. Better a dead kid than an autistic one, I suppose.
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If a family member or a friend is sick and you have the money or the ability to pay for them to be saved you do – why is it not like that when we don’t know the people – that’s a state now, a machine that objectifies other people as inferior or unworthy. Really well put, you nailed it.
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I try to warn people from other countries coming here because if you get sick enough to go to the hospital or injured, you’re fucked.
There was a story of a teacher here who actually got fucking arrested for putting one of her students on her insurance policy so the kid could get a life saving surgery. Empathy is punished in “God’s country.”
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Wow that’s a new kind of awful. Here if you need surgery and it’s urgent the government covers it, if it’s not you go on a waiting list. Private health only speeds up your admission for non-essential hospital.
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With all my mental and physical ailments, I may need to look into moving to another country so I can survive (at least until age 50. I plan on dying at 50 anyway.)
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That’s horrible – give them 50 years of hell then.
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