The comedy show Saturday Night Live here in the USA opened last night with ‘Kathleen Sebelius’ offering some tips on how to get by all the glitches of the new healthcare.gov website that enables more people to apply for health insurance (political name of the program ‘Obamacare’, otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act). ‘Have you tried restarting your computer?’ was her first tip, then a low-res website offering a YES and NO button, followed by signing up in other languages such as Icelandic. Here’s a video clip .. WSL Blog. So now we have Republicans that shut down the government and flirted with the debt ceiling over the new healthcare law, calling for Sebelius’s resignation. They say ‘We’re looking out for the interests of the people’. Well, it’s not that simple. The Republicans are representing rich people. The healthcare law is mostly aimed at poor people, at healthy young people, and sick people (with so-called pre-existing conditions that have disqualified them from healh insurance so far), and at people out of work, who used to get health insurance from their employers. I don’t have sympathy for the argument that the country cannot expand Medicaid (a means-tested program run by the states, supported by the federal government), and at the same time we need to stop the really glaring flaws in affordable health care that a really rich country’s citizens can get. If you’ve lost your job, why should you lose your health insurance? If we are all equal citizens, and you are born into a poor family, why should your mother not have access for herself and for you to health insurance? Every time someone goes to the emergency room, we all pay for it sooner or later .. so we should move toward more preventive care, more access to doctors and nurses and clinics for everyone, not less. The health care industry in the USA is a $2.8 trillion dollar industry. We spend $0 on some people, and 2.5 times the OECD average on others. As for those people that ‘have health insurance’ that will ‘lose’ it through Obamacare (an accusation from the Republicans) : many of those are on a plan that costs $50 per month, that offers $2,000 of cover for medical expenses. That is not health insurance.
