Health Care Shackles

The rank, malodorous netherworld of callousness has filled the air with the current Massachusetts health-care debacle. In numerous otherwise rational and often compassionate blogs as well as mass media, many write and speak of solving the problem by ordering individuals to damned well find their own health care. So there!

Check this post and its comments on BMG for a peek into this hellish health care.

Let's be plain, casting citizens to the wolves while fawning over capitalists is regression at its worst. This was the struggle that led to unions.

Left to their own devices, virtually all capitalists big and small will tend to their own mandate -- profit. Devils and imps did not conspire thinking, "What can we do to harm business owners and reduce their profits?" Unions grew from the long-term, often vicious disregard and disdain for worker health, safety and welfare.

Today in health care, pushing the burden of finding and paying for health insurance entirely by themselves is a dirty lie and a disgrace to our commonwealth. It actually would complete the cycle most employers are finishing. They have reduced both the coverage and the percentage they contribute to the bare minimums.

The fact is that while a capitalist can say, "If you force me, force me I say, to pay for health care, my profits decrease or the cost of my goods increase. So I'll be forced, forced I say, to fire workers."

Horsefeathers. They have been taking the existing savings and upping both their bottom lines and their own income. Meanwhile, in our spendthrift economy, we are strapped by the borrow-and-spend Republicans. Real income has fallen steadily for working Americans.

Now the mandate crap arrives to further reduce the income of the workers and maintain that of the bosses. Hmm. What's wrong with this? Could it be instead that we all should share in the nation's fate? Could it be that the state has to figure out how to handle the problem rather that shifting it to those least able to pay for it and wiping its hands?

Mandates? Six million times no!

Employers have the infrastructure and size to find, economically price and manage health insurance. They should be required to do so, except for the Mom and Pop's, who are exempted from much regulation anyway.

For those who are canned and lose their insurance, we have our national and state safety nets. They are thin, but we can more easily strengthen them than pretend people will be able to do this solo.

This is not the time to kick already struggling workers. Mandates are cruel, irrational and dishonest.