NO EMOTION, NO REALIZATION.

NOT ENOUGH CARE, NO HEALTH CARE.

Krugman makes the following diagnostic: "Despite insurers’ appearance of cooperation with President Obama on health care reform, the double-crossing is well under way... The insurers and the drug companies are, in effect, betting that Mr. Obama will be afraid to call them out on their duplicity."
***

Well health care reform in the USA will go nowhere without the motivation of strong emotions.

Nationalizations of health care systems occurred in Europe after W.W.II (except for the German system). That healthy reaction was part of a general revolt against wealth and profiteers. Indeed, a lot of wealthy individuals and corporations had collaborated with Nazism, and Europe was ravaged by an enormous economic crisis, and had lost control of her destiny to the USSR and the USA.

Only desperate measures had allowed the survival of democracy, and it was clear to the Europeans that wealth had not been on the side of democracy. The wealthy were cowering, and were not going to argue. Several countries reintroduced the death penalty, after more than a century without, and executed collaborators, who, generally, had done it for money and power. So pharmaceutical companies and health care profiteers were not going to sound too unpatriotic. (France executed up to 40,000 fascists, and confiscated companies such as Renault that had shown too much enthusiasm working with the Nazis. Nobody was going to argue too loudly that profiteering was great.)

National health care systems, that is health as a basic human right was the result of a revolt.

Afterwards, health, like freedom, and the pursuit of happiness, was part of the constitution. The question then is this: are Americans revolted enough to get their right? Is Barack Obama revolted enough? Do they even know enough to be revolted enough? Or do they want to keep on sending money to the richest people in the world instead?

Health care as a right will not be born from a post modernist, post partisan, haughty balance of nihilism and profiteering. It will not be born from taking seriously much of the present economic organization of the USA. It will be born out of deliberate, wise, and knowledgeable anger.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/