Letter to the Editor

The most obvious solution to our health care crisis is clearly the single payer, medicare-for-all system that works so well for the people in the other industrialized nations (Western Europe, Australia, Canada – though these programs are under attack as the world-wide oligarchy consolidates). Single payer is excluded from the U.S. discussion due to special interests, segments of the oligarchy, who see such a system as a threat to their continuing robbery of the U.S. public - health insurance and drug companies (cartels). There is also the ideological contingent, brownshirts who shout down any rational discussion with shrill cries of socialism from their pulpits on Fox, CNN etc; Then there is the medical establishment who seem to worship also at the alter of the corporate ideal, profits. An earlier generation of this alliance vehemently opposed the creation of social security and had they prevailed we would have a huge population of the elderly living and dying on the street. I don't think we should be listening to them this time either. The bankrupting of the country that started with Reagan and was pursued by both Bush administrations, was a deliberate strategy for returning us to the “good old days”, when the oligarchy indisputably ruled. The havoc they created, to their great surprise, resulted in the New Deal, a shift in power that arguably was a concession by more sober oligarchs designed to avoid a more complete take-over by ordinary citizens.

What we should be minimally demanding currently is an expanded medicare and we should not be allowing undemocratic fanatics and profiteers to stop us. Instead what we have is a general consensus in the power centers of the media, congress and the administration, on cut-backs for ordinary people and tax cuts for the rich. So the democrats, indebted to monied interests also, if a shade less enthusiastically, throw away their most potent issue for the up-coming election by announcing that social security and medicare cuts are still on the table. The sleight-of-hand that merges social security-medicare, separate programs, taxed separately, reaches thus into our pockets once again. Let us be clear: social security-medicare taxes are SEPARATE! Treating them as just part of the general budget is STEALING. Borrowing with no intention of repayment is indistinguishable from theft. If the government has spent (borrowed) medicare/social security funds on war and tax cuts for the wealthy, they owe it (us) just as sure as they (we?) owe China and other nations who loan the U.S. via treasury bonds. Since the oligarchal 1% are targeting the people then the people have the self-defense option, or responsibility, of renouncing the system by which we are being taken to the cleaners, and replacing it with one that harkens back to the beautiful words, if not the facts, of the Constitution.