Healthcare Reform 101

The entire country is on fire with issues regarding health care reform. The only good thing about this chaos is that, this time, at least we know it is coming and can speak about it, fight about it, and write about it. Looking at this from another perspective, we should thank God for the chaos.

This is not the first “health care reform.” The first health care reform ambushed us unaware in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. We never even knew that we were taken hostage, so none of us, the “healthcare consumers,” said a thing when we were told that our insurance coverage was “now with a health management organization (HMO).” Like Hansel and Gretel, we were obedient, quiet children while the wicked witch shoved us in the oven door.

After being devoured by the HMOs, at some point we became faceless. Doctors, patients, nurses and even hospitals became part of the Health Care Industry – an impenetrable monolith, grinding, churning, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This monolith is a cold, steel fortress belching the black smoke and stench of human flesh and dignity into a dispassionate gray sky.

Our very lives became dependent upon “cost-effectiveness;” we could no longer have this procedure or that procedure without approval; we could no longer have needed medicines because those medicines were “not formulary;” we could no longer choose our doctors based on expertise, credibility and good old beside manner – we had to choose a “contracted physician.”

Because of the cost-effectiveness of minimal institutional staffing, bedsores, once considered the flagship of bad care, became so common that they gained the respect of being called “pressure wounds,” and were simply taken for granted. In turn, the bedsores (demonic offspring of the monolith) gave birth to their own satanic child, MRSA, whose tentacles spread quickly from hospital to hospital, care facility to care facility, until finally, it now invisibly stalks its prey in our schools, grocery stores and public places.

Somewhere in the depths of Hell is a slimy, cold, dark place where “Lobbyists” are sprouted and grown for use by the Health Care Industry. These parasitical mushrooms of humanity cling to the walls of every political hallway, demanding and getting what they want in dollars and cents and human dignity in order to feed the monolith. For their supernatural evil ability to secretly suck the existence of all of us, they, along with the CEOs of the HMOs are paid very handsomely and exorbitantly.

Let us not forget the pharmaceutical companies that have become rich and engorged with power. Last year alone, the “Big Pharma” spent $234 million dollars paying lobbyists, yet Aunt Mildred left the hospital 12 hours after a mastectomy, and Grandpa cannot afford the co-pay on his prescriptions.


“Healthcare Reform” must look at the big picture realistically and do some basic math. Subtract the amount of money needed for the HMOs, the pharmaceutical companies and the lobbyists, and return us to “old fashioned medicine.” There will be plenty of funds for the patient after bacon is made from the hogs in the middle.

These grass-roots fires all over the U.S. are good. If enough citizens finally get up off our armchairs of apathy and regain a voice, we will throw gasoline on those fires! The end result just might be a government of the people, by the people and for the people.