For Communists Only

And now that I have your attention, watch these two segments from last week's Bill Moyers Journal:

The first one, where communist Wendell Potter (formerly a vicepresident at Cigna) tries to convince socialist Bill Moyers that President Obama's health care reform plan is worth voting for.

The second one, where Marxist Marcia Angell (former Editor of the New England Journal of Medicine) argues for why we'd be better off with the status quo for a few more years.

At the end of the episode, Bill Moyers asked his viewers to express themselves in favor or in opposition of reform. I know my post does not answer the question, but it summarizes how I feel about the health care kabuki theater. In italics, below.

To a foreigner who has lived in the United States for almost twenty years, the health care reform debacle is almost incomprehensible. It becomes simple to understand once one reminds himself of the fact that Americans have been brainwashed to think of themselves as Number One, in every field of human endeavor, no matter all evidence to the contrary.

As everybody who has ever been the best at something knows, being Number One at anything requires not just confidence in one's strengths, but awareness of one's limits, something that most Americans are completely oblivious to.

That is how, in the midst of the health care reform fiasco, most Americans are shamefully blind to the fact that no other advanced country treats health care as a commodity, and that there are plenty of successful examples around the world of countries that have tamed the health care beast with better outcomes and at lower costs. Imagine how surprised most Americans would be to find out that, in spite of Republican fearmongering, many of those countries have thriving health insurance sectors.

You can't fix health care until you fix stupid.