Money tells me what I need to know about this issue

I am one of those who hasn’t yet put my home phone on the national do not call list. I hardly ever answer the thing anyway because we’re seldom ever home, and it has caller ID so we can usually tell when it’s a telemarketer on the other end.

But there are still calls that annoy me.

The ones that annoy me the most are the ones that are calling from a western state where it’s two or three hours earlier than it is here and they ring me at 10 p.m.

If you’re calling me at home at 10 p.m., someone better be dead, or so close to it that the music is playing.

I don’t care if you’re in jail at 10 p.m. I’m not coming to get you anyway.

I care if you’ve had an accident that requires hospitalization—that qualifies for the nearly dead part.

I don’t care if you’ve stubbed your toe. I don’t care if your feelings were hurt. I don’t care if you lost your car keys.

And lately, we’ve been getting another round of political calls, always automated with no human voice I can yell at for any reason.

I usually just unplug the phone until I think they’re done spouting and then plug it back in again—maybe. Every once in a while, if a call really annoys me, I’ll dial back the number and let AT&T try the number for me for the next hour until they make a connection in between computer-generated dialing on the other end, then just let the phone hang there.

I don’t know if that actually works, but it’s fun to think so anyway.

Last week, I started getting calls from robo-dial companies urging me to call my Congressman and urge them not to approve the current health-care legislation because it would cost me thousands in taxes over the next 10 years and my family would get nothing for it, it would bankrupt the country, and a litany of other reasons I paid no attention to either.

I’ve always believed that if you follow the money, you find the truth, particularly where politics are concerned.

So I followed the money.

I have received no calls from anyone urging me to call my Congressman and ask for passage of health care legislation.

That tells me right away that the opponents have more money already to finance the robo-call companies to beat the legislation.

And those companies that have the most money are always looking for ways to keep it.

So beating this legislation helps these companies keep their money. I know that health insurance companies, health-delivery companies and pharmaceutical companies have spent a lot of money on Congressmen to beat this legislation. That tells me they need the legislation beaten to ensure they keep their money.

Because other than the occasional user-financed charitable donation, few major corporations have any semblance of an altruistic thought.

And then I have to stop and think—why do they care? The current health care reform legislation approved recently by Congress is not the universal health care package that 80 percent of Americans have asked for over decades, it is simply a universal health-insurance package.

What this legislation does, in its most bottom-line approach, is ensure that, and in some cases mandate that, every person in the United States has access to health insurance, not health care.

We all know that having health insurance doesn’t mean we get access to health care. It means we get a corporate bureaucrat whose job it is to make money for his employers deciding what we can and can’t have in terms of health care.

So why do I care what this legislation does. Yes, it should have been beaten, but not for the issues the caller gave me.

It should have been beaten because it’s not the universal health care that 80 percent of the people in the United States asked for during the last three decades, and are willing to pay for.

Personally, an insurance industry subsidy bill that charges me for their profits is not health care reform, it’s a money-in-the-pockets-of-politicians reform, and a skyrocketing-profit-margin-for-health-related-industries reform.

And I really don’t care how many right-wing nuts climb out of the woodwork on this one. Universal health care for all sentient beings of a modern industrial country should be a given, not a fight.

Now let them call me back and ask for my opinion instead of handing me theirs. I’ll keep them on the phone for an hour explaining why universal health insurance is a fraud designed to make money for insurance companies, not to provide health care for the people of this great nation.

And by the way. A Merry Christmas to you all. And a happy New Year.

No Comments »