NON-FICTION: Healthcare, get it over with!

I am so sick of the irrelevant arguments traded back and forth over the issue of health reform. Nobody likes HMO's. They were an artificial creation facilitated by the government under Richard Nixon.

Nobody denies that they make profits by denying healthcare and nobody can deny that most people are not satisfied with the current system.

Some conservatives are taking the "I agree theirs a problem, but that's just not the way to solve it." angle, which is entirely disingenuous.

The mainstream conservative angle for the past eight years has been fear of foreigners, be they from south of the border, north of Korea, or east of Africa.

And they still pursue those issues on Fox News. About the only time they give a damn about healthcare is when they are trying to scare people away from accepting government run healthcare or inventing horror stories of the all the countries that have some sort of socialized healthcare.

They find one or two Candians to tell us ignorant Americans the nightmare north of us. Just like they found Iraqis who were begging us to invade, gays who want to be saved, and Iranians who desperately seek the intervention of the great United States.

Their story is the same old story warmongers and advocates of tyranny never tire of telling, fear of the Others.

Fox news might as well hire Ana-Lucia as a prime time host and have her kill an Other every night on air.

And now, when this country is suffering another bout of economic diarrhea, unable to hold down any financial nourishment in the lower parts of it's system (and after binging on food unwilling to meet any standards of safety,) now they come back with more fear, fear of health care for everyone.

Back in the nineties they demonized Hillary with the 'government between you and your doctor' line and now they repeat it every time they face the camera.

They imagine that now we have direct contact with 'our' doctor. As if this were the imagined fifties old timey down home Andy Griffith Show bullshit they remember to ward off the actuality of corruption, racism, and the ever present poor.

Who the hell has 'a doctor' nowadays? More and more of us our unemployed, and our insurance provides us with very little long term one on one contact with 'a doctor.'

At the same time, most people I know over forty have to pay a large portion of their income in prescription bills.

The insurance money they pay goes to guaranteeing them more and more medical costs as they get older, and closer to retiring, and not earning an income.

This is the system the Republicans are defending. Their system.

It's a tired analogy to make, but essential to keep in mind: Libraries. I'm sitting in one. I come here to use the internet and check out books.

I could go to Borders and buy or browse new copies of the books I have checked out now (two on statistics, three on Kepler, two on writing, and a novel "Netherland")

But I get it free here. I can research and learn, all for free! It's magical.

And yet, our pro-freedom, traditional liberty-loving conservatives prefer that I drive over to a privately owned bookstore and pay for every little page I turn.

That's the freedom of the free market. The freedom to pay for everything, the freedom for your bookstore, or your doctors managers, to charge you more and more, as much as they can get away with at each point, so that they can continue to grow.

What a splendid freedom to have to buy books that are cheaper to provide for the cost of a library card and funds provided by taxes.

What a glorious, god-given freedom to pay for medicine and doctor's visits that other countries get for free.

What an even more blessed freedom to not even have to worry about scheduling a doctor's appointment, because you can't find a full time job, you're too much of a risk, or you fit into any of the other free-from-medicine categories.

The fact is that it is more efficient to organize essential services collectively. Production in bulk is cheaper, providing services that you know everyone will need or use is better done on the scale that it is going to effect: the large scale: the national scale.

That's why the conservatives poo themselves at the thought of the federal government not increasing military funding enough, cutting that funding, or not giving certain aspects of our federal government enough power, like the CIA, NSA, FBI.

People that have jobs and pay taxes make more and better service available for those of us who are poor, come from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and can't find work.

All this talk of rights and socialism and slippery slopes is a stupid, pedantic distraction from the fact that everyone needs health care, medicine, and access to doctors. The question of how to provide it is one that we can answer as a community, a nation, a people, or as citizens of our private, ideologically formed alienation, wherein we each exist free of systemic cause and effect.

And that is the ultimate freedom conservatives that motivates conservatives to think of every Freddy Krueger nightmare they can to scare; the freedom to ignore the dialectic character of reality, the simultaneity of causation, the dependence of big upon small, poor upon rich, and the history upon the individual, the individual on law, one human on the next.