don's report archive

by Donald B. Ardell, Ph. D.

Wellness in the Headlines
(Don's Report to the World)

My essay on the House-passed health reform bill drew many comments. If you wrote in, thank you very much, even if you did suggest I was the Devil's spawn or direct descendant of Attila the Hun.

Just kidding—all the feedback was positive. Most writers seemed to agree that this bill does little to reform our profit-driven, wasteful and inflationary system. The distorted incentives are ignored so more money will pour into a system based on maximizing private profits, not increasing quality of life or reducing wasteful spending.

Bruce Midgett from Missoula, MT wrote this: 

Don - I can't come up with the most appropriate superlatives to reflect my response to your essay. "Stunning" and "Holy Shit!" come to mind—in that order. I must admit I was, for a time, lured by the incrementalists. It did seem reasonable that we could accomplish this health reform deal by creeping forward in the dark of night when no one was looking. Just a little at a time. A step now, maybe two next time. Social, political, economic and cultural change used to be possible that way. No more.

Then, as I heard and read more from the Obama-Pelosi-Reid incrementalists and cringed at the absolute inanities from Max Baucus—my own senator, concerning measures his committee was considering, I backed away from the "one step now, more later" approach. Now I am starting to return to my Marxist-leanings of earlier years.

I used to be a student activist, an antipoverty agency director, a health planning consultant and a flaming radical. Nothing I have read recently has so superbly encapsulated the severe systemic problems of the American health care, educational and other systems as your carefully crafted, supremely well conceived and written companion essay.

Steve Jonas offered this:

Terrific commentary. Your essay brings out your old (only chronologically) health care policy analyst self—and does so oh-so-correctly. The House bill is absolutely one to oppose, for many reasons in addition to its getting an effective abortion-ban-for-many nose under the tent. It's not health care reform, but like Clinton's welfare burial, it's health care "de-form." And boy could I go on about Clinton! Few realize how much he virtually torpedoed his own health care bill. His line now is "Anything is better than nothing." WRONG, unless you are an anti-choicer or an insurance company.

Bob Ludlow, a commentator to regular visitors here, offered the following:

You have done a fine job making the major causes of the health-care mess intelligible to moderately informed people like me. Let's agree to call it a mess rather than a crisis, because crisis describes acute, not chronic, problems; and our grotesque, for-profit boondoggle of a health-care system has been failing, and bilking us, for more than 50 years. Actually, mess is far from the best descriptor because it fails to capture the treacherous, underlying cynicism driving the money-machine euphemism called health care.

You also make it clear why the bill that passed in the House is a pusillanimous, greed-driven, conspiratorial capitulation designed to provide a smokescreen of protection for the obscene, money-grubbing sinecure enjoyed by the entrenched private insurance and drug companies that are responsible for the worst health care system in the developed world. (I would be remiss not to mention the role of keeping the flow of campaign contributions coming in to our elected representatives.) At its worst, the entire health care enterprise is a kind of killing field, a quiet holocaust of omission for millions of uninsured and underinsured Americans. It is a moral, ethical and humanitarian outrage of the greatest proportions, cynically sacrificing human lives and well-being on the altar of the remorseless death machine known as American capitalism. 

Of course your message will never reach the contemptible right-wing rank and foul. The Faux News-educated town-hall protesters and tea-baggers will never read the Ardell Wellness Report. The only way those keep-your-goddamn-government-hands-off-my-Medicare ditto heads might come in contact with even a portion of your message is if some vile propagandist in the right-wing reality-distortion field took something you said out of context and misquoted you in order to reinforce their ignorant biases.

As a member of the reality-based community, I note with regretful approval your acknowledgment that there will not be anything approaching quality-of-life provisions in this legislative abomination. Indeed, if influential idiots like Senator Harkin have their way, we may well see a travesty of REAL wellness in the final bill in the form of support for alternative medical placebo quackery, such as therapeutic touch, acupuncture, and even prayer healing.

In the end, we live in capitalist America, which means it's all about money and political influence, where socialist plots like genuine health care reform are legislatively dead on arrival.

If more visitors wrote in like Bruce Midgett, Steve Jonas and Bob Ludlow, I could have a pretty good column that required me to do little more than post their commentaries. 

Be well. Look on the bright side of life.

(Note: This essay will be filed in the archives in the PHYSICAL DOMAIN under the skill area of adaptations and challenges. Additional articles related to this theme may be found there.)

(Ed. Note: Views expressed in this and other columns are those of the author and not necessarily those of the SeekWellness Editorial Board.)

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