Impristine, I'm so sorry to hear that you are disfigured. Your soul is very interesting to mine, incidentally.
I can't really write a very good poem about HMO's, or the larger mess that is our health system. My opinion is that in looking at macro trends, medical care has become very expensive because we all expect to live long lives with extensive intervention at the end. At the same time, since the technology exists to save younger and younger premature infants, we do that as well. If you have millions of dollars being spent on these babies, and expenses in the last few months of life of several hundred thousand dollars for people who are definitely dying anyway, something is going to have to give in the middle.
Everyone wants the very best care, but doesn't want to spend the money it takes to provide that for OTHER people. It is an essential dichotomy. There certainly is an argument to be made for nationalizing health care, because the profits the HMO's are making are obscene. On the other hand, where nationalization has been tried, there are still lots of problems in terms of waiting several months for "elective" surgeries like hip replacements. This sounds benign in principle, but many people are so weakened generally after a long period of loss of mobility that they perish.
HMO's are big business. Republicans like and protect big business, for the most part. It will be interesting to see how this turns out. Unfortunately, Clinton is so weakened at this point that he was utterly ineffective at getting HMO regulation through Congress. Where we may disagree is how much responsibility he himself bears for the situation he is in. |
