01/30/10

Sorry, Can’t Help You:

       There are many ways to measure the serious shortcomings in America’s broken healthcare system.  From costs that are far too high to the uninsured that are far too many, the problems in providing affordable healthcare to everyone have proven to be insurmountable.  If nothing else, that’s what Americans have learned from the bizarre and perpetual puppet show in Congress, where the strings are pulled with deft precision by the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.  Healthcare Reform?  It’s merely a cruel oxymoron.

       Now we can add still another outward sign of how broken is America’s healthcare system.  On Friday, January 29, the U.S. military stopped the mercy flights out of Haiti that were ferrying Haitian citizens aboard C-130 planes to the United States to be treated for life-threatening injuries suffered in the Armageddon-like earthquake that ruined an already impoverished nation January 12.  The reason for suspending the flights?  The cost, specifically who’s going to pay for the treatment.  Most of the mercy flights were going to Florida, where Republican Governor Charlie Crist complained that his state couldn’t afford it and that the federal government has to pay.  What’s wrong Governor Crist?  Can’t the system in which you and every Republican puts their faith, the “Free Enterprise” system pay for it?  I thought you didn’t want “interference” from the federal government.

       As in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, here is another example of how America’s current healthcare system makes life-saving decisions a crass bottom-line function, not a humanitarian one.  As every other western nation knows from practical experience, the only nondiscriminatory system that works, the only system that provides healthcare for everyone, regardless of station in life or catastrophic circumstance, is a single-payer system.  Since the interests of the American people are subordinated to the interests of corporations, tellingly reinforced by the recent Supreme Court decision that allows corporate America to buy any politician they want to, there is no way that sane and effective healthcare reform on any level, much less a single-payer system, will ever see the light of day.

       So, once again, the United States of America is telling the rest of the world that we can’t provide life-saving medical care because we can’t afford it, because America’s system of healthcare is only concerned about the profits that can be made in treating those who can pay for it, and not about anything remotely resembling a humanitarian concern for anyone truly in need.  The Haitian people should understand that this is how we treat our own people.  Why should they expect to be treated differently? 

       While they and we wait to see who’s going to pay, which, according to the rules of our current healthcare system really means who’s going to make a buck from other people’s misery, Haitians who are suffering horrific burns, spinal cord injuries, crushed internal organs and myriad other injuries, were left to die.

UPDATE:  Responding to an uproar over the cancellation fo the mercy flights, the White House intervened four days later and ordered the U.S. military to resume the airlift of Injured Haitians .  It was still not clear how already overcrowded U.S. medical facilities were going to handle the incoming patients, or who was going to pay for their medical care.

                                                                                                    John Wydra, WydeWorld.com