Recent Comments on the Health Care Debate

Recently, I noticed on the Charbor Chronicles Facebook account that someone, a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton, continually kept posting negative things about Bernie Sanders. Initially, I kind of just scoffed and kept scrolling down.

Earlier today, however, I noticed something by this individual about Sanders, and in the comments section, he labeled the health care system reforms proposed by Sanders as laughable.

This is one issue (environmentalism being the other) where I think that Americans in the mainstream of politics, both to the left and to the right, just get it wrong.

I decided to respond, which really is not like me. Getting into arguments online with people I do not know all that well is not my thing, although there certainly are a lot of such arguments to be found everywhere on the web. But the whole "laughable" thing just bugged me a little too much to simply let it go, and I decided to go ahead and respond, since what seems to me to be "laughable" is that the United States remains the only industrialized nation in the world to have a for profit healthcare system instead of one that actually works for citizens.

So, it seemed like something worth sharing here, as anyone who follows this blog regularly, or who knows me personally, understands that this is one of the major issues that really burns me about the United States and it's sorry political state at this moment. Here are my comments in response to this individual's post:


"Unnamed, not to sound confrontational, but how is Bernie's health care plan "laughable" when every other industrialized country in the world has something similar, and most of these work better, even far better, than our own for profit healthcare system here in America? It would be one thing if it was completely untested, but it is not. In fact, the United States stands as the only nation in the world that does not have a system like that in place, and it fails Americans as a result. Prices are too often ridiculous, and on this particular issue, the rest of the world scoffs at the for profit healthcare system here in the United States. Those other countries are democratic and have free access to information, yet after decades, not one has chosen to scrap their system in favor of ours. Yet, every election cycle, it is one of the biggest issues here in America. Maybe if some of the people who dismiss such a system as "Pie in the sky rainbows unicorns and fairy dust" actually bothered to look past our own borders to see that we can actually learn something from what other countries are doing, we might be a better country for it.

"Or maybe we can just remain ugly Americans who feel too stuck up to learn from anyone else. Yes, we can continue to have the whole world laugh at our political system and wonder why we never learn as a country. I never understood the automatic assumption by far too many Americans, both to the right and clearly, as we see here, to the left, that everything we do, in every regard, is systematically the standard bearer that the whole world should unquestioningly follow. Have none of you met anyone in your lives who have paid outrageous medical bills? And if so, did the thought ever occur that we deserve better than this?"