Doctor, Doctor, Mister MD

I am an amateur. No one is less informed about medicine than I. Oh I don’t mean that I can’t pronounce chemical names or explain how DNA and RNA are room mates. Any boob can do that. Yep, DNA has these interesting hydrogen-carbon bonds. Crick and Watson ain’t got nothin’ on this baby. 

The thing I can’t figger out is how the insurance companies and their sympathizing  cadre of duck walking doctors at the AMA (American Medical Association) continue to be opposed to health care reform in these United States. But even if I can decipher that, I can’t fully comprehend how they get to politicians. Do the lobbies simply stuff money in the pockets of senators and representatives? Is it that simple?

Money plus fear creates strict obedience on capitol hill.

The insurance companies want no reform. This makes sense. They’re making money at record levels and the system of letting the uninsured bob or drown at the doors of emergency rooms doesn’t affect them–after all, the poor are served as unfunded mandates, which means that the states have to pay for their care–which means that currently almost no one is paying reliably for this.

In short people in politics or in the corporate offices of the health insurance industry or in the halls of the AMA get good Christmas bonuses for letting the poor die.

Is this a holy thing to see?  William Blake wrote:

Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduc’d to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?

Is that trembling cry a song?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty!

And their sun does never shine,
And their fields are bleak and bare,
And their ways are fill’d with thorns:
It is eternal winter there.

For where-e’er the sun does shine,
And where-e’er the rain does fall,
Babe can never hunger there,
Nor poverty the mind appall.

 

It is of course Blake’s last stanza that explains the AMA. The sun is shining in their gated communities.  

The AMA and the health insurance lobbyists are comfortable with two Americas. They are eating well in perfect sunshine and their children lack for nothing and like the young Siddhartha they see no poverty at all.

Indeed the AMA thinks poverty is someone else’s problem.

 

S.K.