Real Healthcare 101 Lesson One

Health Care 101 – Lesson One
Today we begin a new series of as yet undetermined length, in which we will take a look at my overly simplistic views on American healthcare...
Let's listen in, the class is about to start....

Hello Class. Let me just say this from the start:
The entire health care debate is a farce, a fraud and a smokescreen. I have listened for weeks and months, (up until we shut our TV off) listened to so called ‘experts and pundits’ rant, bloviate, pontificate, and more. I have heard so much rhetoric, some factual, most just outright lies from both sides that it sickens me.

I have read blogs and Facebook posts stating that the healthcare bill is, (depending on whose post I’m reading, either the end of America as we know it, or a new day for a great country').
You’re all hoodwinked. The ‘poli-tricksters’, like Steel Pulse famously said, are ‘drinking human blood’, with ‘concrete hearts that can hold no love’. Here is a video of the song, for those who are uninitiated..



You wanna talk health care? You REALLY wanna talk Healthcare???

Then let’s talk tobacco

According to the American Cancer Society:
Tobacco use is responsible for nearly 1 in 5 deaths in the United States. Because cigarette smoking and tobacco use are acquired behaviors -- activities that people choose to do -- smoking is the most preventable cause of death in our society.
Each year about 443,600 people in the United States die from illnesses related to tobacco use. Link here:
www.cancer.org/docroot/PED/content/PED_10_2X_Cigarette_Smoking.asp


That’s about 8531 people per week, 1219 per day, roughly 50 per hour (In the time it takes you to read this post, 4 people will die)


Smoking cigarettes kills more Americans than alcohol, car accidents, suicide, AIDS, homicide, and illegal drugs combined. Based on data collected from 1995 to 1999, the CDC estimated that adult male smokers lost an average of 13.2 years of life and female smokers lost 14.5 years of life because of smoking. Not to mention the often HORRIFIC ways that smokers die when tobacco kills them…

So with a killer like this on the loose, one would think that the FIRST order of business for this Pro-healthcare President and this caring congress, would be to ban tobacco, right?
WRONG! Why not?
Money. Plain and simple, You smokers are worth more dying than healthy…

In 2007 (the most recent year with totals)According to the NY Times and others: The individual states received over $19,000,000,000 in tax revenues from tobacco sales.
The federal Government received some $7,000,000,000 in revenues from tobacco.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/weekinreview/31saul.html

So $26 Billion in tax revenue, not to mention that: The tobacco lobby spent nearly $22 million on capital hill in 2007, and $25 million in 2008 according to
http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2009/03/tobacco-lobby-lights-up-debate.html

So, the late Michael Jackson said it best:
‘All I wanna say is that, they don’t really care about us’

443,000 people are going to die this year, 443,600 people with families, spouses, children, grand-children, colleagues, etc. People who will be grieved, missed, and longed for. 443,600 suffer and die, and they don't care. Consider these people sacrificed so that the Government can make money, and the tobacco companies can make money, and the hospitals can make money, and the pharmaceutical companies can make money, the insurance companies can make money, and on and on it goes. There is absolutely No impetus on the part of any of these players to ban this lethal substance, which has, since you stated reading killed 3 people.

There are those of you who will point to the economic boost that tobacco gives teh economy by keeping people employed, yadda yadda. The fact is that, like customer service at Citibank, Nike Soccer balls, and Kathie Lee's clothing line, tobacco is outsourced:
"In the 1950s there were more than 500,000 small family tobacco farms. Today there are fewer than 85,000, with a drop of more than 100,000 just since 1980. Purchases of U.S.-grown tobacco leaf are down, farming costs are up, prices are not keeping up with inflation, and grower profits have shrunk steadily.

The reduced purchases of U.S.-grown tobacco leaf have little to do with the gradual smoking declines in the United States. Instead, they are tied almost entirely to the decisions of the U.S. cigarette companies to manufacture more of their products overseas and to use more foreign-grown tobacco in the cigarettes that they make both here and abroad. Since 1980, the U.S. share of worldwide tobacco exports has been cut almost in half. Although American manufacturers are now selling more cigarettes than ever before, from 1997 to 1999 the U.S. cigarette companies reduced their purchases of American tobacco leaf for domestic cigarette manufacturing by roughly 35 percent." - source: http://www.tobaccofreekids.org/reports/falsefriends/executive_summary.shtml

Where is the outrage? Where is the hue and cry? You want to rally around a cause? Fight for 'change that you can believe in'? Wanna have tea or coffee at a party? Here’s the galvanizing moment…
But it’ll NEVER happen. Why? Because you believe what they tell you to…

Wake up folks…

Next: Health Care 101 Lesson Two: Agribusiness and the factory farms

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