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The picture above comes with a story. The story is very interesting, but also very common, sadly, for people who depend on publicly funded health insurance. The people in the picture above are protesting the fact that private clinics such as Carle Clinic are refusing to accept public funds, which means that many people are going without healthcare. If you depend on public healthcare, there are no clinics around directly run by the government, and private clinics refuse to accept Medicare/Medicaid, then that leaves a bunch of people totally screwed by the system that is supposed to be caring for them.
This blog post will start by providing information to those who may not understand what the world is like when you depend on public (tax funded) insurance, namely *Medicare* or *Medicaid*. If you did not know that these are the names of our public health programs, you pay all your taxes AND you fight actively to pay less taxes, then you should think twice about your logic.
This is because:
if you know nothing about what your taxes pay for, then how can you even possibly understand what the impact is of every dollar less that you pay in taxes?
Taxes are the price that we pay to live in America.
It's the price we pay to live in our cities and in our particular neighborhoods.
If you work hard everyday and take pride in what you do--which you should, considering that you spend all day doing it--then you should fully understand that your income taxes are going, at least in part, to fund things like the public health system.
Making "change" in the system ultimately means being proactive in the system. Being proactive means CONSTANTLY and CONSISTENTLY voicing to the government that WE WILL NOT TOLERATE failed public policies!!!
We will not tolerate a failed healthcare system!!!! Or a failed public education system!!!! Or any failed public entity that is supposed to be created and paid for by the people, for the people.
Fortunately for us, Obama's election changes the game a whole lot. This man has made himself open to caring.
So, for those of us (and there really need to be MORE) who care, we can hopefully have a good shot of getting our frustrations through to an Obama Presidential administration, and enact real change.
We must all understand that by electing Obama, we have gone through a MAJOR paradigm (era) change. We took the red pill, we took the plunge. We now need to SOAR with it!! We need to start caring about each other.
In terms of taxes, this means that we must remember and understand that our daily work pays for:
Healthcare (including mental health and dental care), schools, building roads and bridges, having/maintaining a plumbing and a sewage system (to take care of our waste and our poop), electricity, clean water that is germ free, public education campaigns (to raise awareness about things like STD's and what to do in case of a natural disaster), the salaries of public officers (police officers, politicians, people who clean our streets), the War in Iraq and Afghanistan, the War on Drugs, the cost to build a massive defense and weapons systems (including atom and hydrogen bombs), the cost to keep military bases up and running in countries around the world, funding our prisons and the death penalty, public transportation, building parks, using to conserve nature and the wilderness, etc etc etc etc.
The list of what our taxes pay for goes ON AND ON AND ON. This is why it is important to be AWARE and VIGILANT.
When you pay private insurance, you are paying for insurance on top of what you already pay to the government.
This is because public healthcare is stereotyped as being 'welfare' - only for the needy and the poor who can't afford better health services.
The Editor of Obama IS America! argues that universal healthcare would be a good thing, even though it would require some MAJOR restructuring of our public healthcare system--which is we need to do anyway and which WE are going to have to ultimately pay for. We should restructure our public health system in a way that incorporates ALL Americans. This would make the most sense, considering that every tax paying citizen ends up paying for it anyway through our tax system.
It makes no sense that some of us end up forking over all this money to private health companies (private meaning that a vast minority of people make a huge profit), or going without any healthcare at all when we could ALL be getting GOOD healthcare just by paying our taxes, which we have to pay anyway!
The thing with setting up a system of universal healthcare is that we already have the groundwork set up for us, but on the small scale. This fact is well demonstrated by the case of the Protest against Carle Clinic in Champaign, Illinois highlighted in the photo and story above.
Private clinics can accept public money. If they accept public money, this means that the price that they get paid per client will be lower since public funding cannot afford to pay for care in the way that private insurance can.
Public insurance pays for the health care of people who are involved in the Medicaid/Medicare programs. However, right now, to access these programs you either have to be under the federal poverty level, have young children, be disabled somehow, or be over the age of 65. So, as you can imagine, this creates another problem with the Medicare/Medicaid system:
It leaves about 37 million taxpaying Americans without any health insurance whatsoever.
If you add the 9 million uninsured children to the figure above, that means that 46 million Americans are going without any healthcare whatsoever.
This is a disgrace, especially since we are already PAYING for a healthcare system through taxes.
In general, the Editor of this blog thinks that a well planned universal healthcare system is a real possibility based on our existing healthcare structures. It could mean that EVERYONE would be taken care of, and the treatment we'd get would be GOOD! We just have to make sure that the program is well designed, not overly (and unnecessarily bureaucratic), is actually in the interest of ALL the people, and has good oversight.
As a united voice, the American people can pretty much work together on anything and have it be good. So why not work together to build a new, sustainable, fair, and well-structured public health system?
It has yet to be seen whether or not Obama truly does care about making fundamental changes for American growth in a positive direction. His stances are especially important considering how bad things are right now in certain ways...
- Racial rioting is as bad as ever if not WORSE for some communities, like the Latino community, which has seen a *RISE* in hate crimes over the last year. In New York, an Ecuadorean man who had been in the US for 20 years got STABBED TO DEATH by seven teenagers, because some kids were out looking to *kill a Mexican*.
- The American economy is in the dumps right now, we are at the brink of failure as a nation, and we--like big dolts--keep pumping money into the pocketbooks of rich bankers and jet flying auto-makers who want US to pay for their failures.
- We are at war, and have caused the mass killings of millions of people across the planet, sparking an all out global WAR on terrorism, which is supported at home by hateful rhetoric toward Muslims, Muslim looking people like Sikhs (who aren't even Muslim at all--Sikhism is its own religion).
- We still have all this hate brewing at home for Obama, causing people to commit hate crimes in a backlash against Obama winning.
Times are crazy!
And Obama happens to be the man in the middle, holding everyone together with his message of hope--and WE are the ones that have to make sure he gets the job done, and gets it done well.
THIS CANNOT BE EMPHASIZED ENOUGH : CHANGE WILL NOT HAPPEN UNLESS WE GET INVOLVED IN THE FUNCTIONING OF OUR OWN GOVERNMENT,
which translates into : THE FUNCTIONING OF OUR OWN LIVES!!
WE NEED TO START TAKING SOME RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE STUFF GOING ON IN THE WORLD THAT WE DON'T LIKE IF WE WANT THINGS TO GET ANY BETTER!!!!!!
So the point of this blog post ultimately is:
BE AWARE of where your money goes, especially when you fork out a large chunk of your monthly paycheck to TAXES!!
Pay attention to the things going on in your life, and all of the world around you!!
Be considerate of the other people around you, and how they you, your opinions, and the things that you value affect them.
Also, please click on the links above and check out the sites they lead to. They have been included to take you to the source sites, which can provide you with lots of interesting information.
DON'T HATE, EDUCATE!
DON'T HATE, COMMUNICATE!
YEAH!!!!
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