As you may have guessed or maybe read before I write impulsively. Something hits me or I read something and I espouse my opinions. Or if it is sports related it is usually a reaction to something.
If it is around public policy I usually try to come up with a solution to the problem. The problem is I go pretty deep into the weeds and sometimes really far into one corner and pick on some deep weeds. Today I am going to try and stay out of the weeds. Wish me luck.
So I was reading an article that said over 80 million people in this country have Medicaid or CHIPS. So I looked it up, as of 2019 there are approximately 328 million people in this county. Doing the simple math that means about 25% of our country is needing government assistance for health care. This is not total number of people needing government assistance, this is just for health care. And just recently the ACA or Obamacare was upheld by the Supreme Court and that is separate from Medicaid and CHIPS since you have to pay a premium to have ACA coverage. Think about that for a moment. A quarter of our country cannot afford healthcare coverage on their own.
And this post isn’t about the above statistic. It is about what drives this statistic. This problem does need to be addressed, yet hopefully we could do it as part of addressing the broader problem that causes the above scenario.
I love it when Republicans say we do not want socialism in this country, yet it is their previous policies that drive the need for socialistic sounding public policy like Medicaid.
You cannot continue to favor the wealthy over all other aspects of how this country is governed. If you do, you get socialism, either by continued need and the Democrats pushing this legislation or eventually a public upheaval where whole swaths of the country start revolting.
And partly this is about the wealth gap, or mainly about the wealth gap. It may just depend on how you address the disparity of how people in this country are treated.
Think about infrastructure. I have mentioned before the current proposal was watered down. Then under the myth of bi-partisanship it ended up no where near where it needed to be. With the watered down proposal, it is now seriously lacking.
And it is not socialism to say our government needs to take care of the infrastructure of this country. Maybe using all tax dollars to pay for everything isn’t the most productive way to get there, but we need to find ways to address our needs completely and effectively.
So hopefully not to go too deep into the weeds, we do need to address how infrastructure is paid for, or how we can change the dynamic of the government helping 25% of our country with healthcare or many other burdens placed on society because our policy is titled towards the ultra wealthy. Even the Democrats cannot unburden us from this dilemma.
And it is not socialism to address these issues. Socialism is created when you do not go towards a more equitable social and public policy that creates more balance in society.
I have spent the morning doing chores around the house going deep into the weeds in my head with ideas to help us out. I will spare you the details. If you ever want to ask, you can email me, somewhere in all the data is my email address. I have spoken to some ideas before, but in general there are many good ideas to address the specifics of public policy for healthcare or infrastructure or other public policy that go beyond what some people call socialism.
So do not let so called conservative politicians tell you that public policy that addresses the needs of the many is socialism. The free market or capitalism does better when the vast majority benefit from it, not just a few.
Again I have dug into the weeds on many previous posts and can at any given moment, but for today I wanted to address the statistic of the healthcare to highlight again why we must continue to fight the good fight. And as you know I do not feel either the Democrats or the Republicans have a clue what are the solutions.
The article was in Yahoo Finance online if you want to read more. The article does perturb me a bit for some specific reasons, but I will leave that alone since I want to highlight the the importance of the statistic it bases its arguments from.
Hope your summer is going well.
No comments:
Post a Comment