My husband has to have dental surgery on his mouth very soon. He has a root canal along with a post and crown with some fillings. You would think that the insurance that my husband pays for every month through his employer would cover a great deal of the cost, but alas that is grievously wrong. To have all of this done, we will have to pay the grand total of nearly three-thousand dollars! If you have choked a little, that's understandable. When you work really hard and you think that your money is working for you, that really sucker punches you. With the whole healthcare bill being the the hot-button issue, second to the BP oil explosion crisis in the Gulf of Mexico, you would think that there would be progress when it came to problems of this magnitude. Obviously that hasn't happened at all. Why is that we are in the minority when it comes to not having socialized medicine? It makes absolutely no sense to me, because it really seems like we are going backwards rather than forwards.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first president to propose government-mandated healthcare insurance as part of his Social Security program. This effort proved unsuccessful, because passed he away before the transition could be completed. Great Britain and many other provinces use this model as their healthcare plan, but we somehow fell short. Now in this country, we have huge companies like Humana, Cigna, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield, and United Healthcare. These companies make billions while many patients still struggle just to get treated. Many people in this country still remain without health insurance. According to the Congressional Budget Office, forty-six million Americans are without health insurance. The sick part of that number is that my older sister is part of that number. My sister is a hairstylist, but, because of her chosen profession, she doesn't get a healthcare plan with her employment package. Now if there was socialized healthcare, that wouldn't be a concern. Who knows if the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will cover all of this.
Now people might see this argument as my liberal complaint, but this is really a case of practicality. Not everyone in the world has a six figure income and can cover large medical bills. It really astounds me that insurance companies only want to turn a profit and it's scary that they make more money to deny a claim. This is why it seems that it would be more urgent than ever to go beyond a public option and bring the plan that FDR had to fruition. Who really gives a damn what corporations fall in the wake of it or if they want to stay in business make them supplementary for cosmetic procedures. This way, if you have to pay for it, there is a reason for only getting a percentage taken care of. So many people already spend so much when it comes to plastic surgery, why not make the insurance companies pay a percentage of that.
There are other things in this country that are socialized like the police departments, public libraries, public school systems, social security, and even medicare. Medicare and Social Security were part of the original incomplete plan. Conservatives consider that people who want socialized medicine are all poor or uneducated. That is absolutely not true! Everyone has their angle with this difficult issue, because of the Republican/Democrat dispute. I don't think it helps that we have television personalities on networks like FOX News and CNN to influence public opinion. It seems that rather than reading, people watch television, but I digress. I wish that I didn't have to put a price on a person's health in the United States. It seems as if it should be a person's unalienable right. Hopefully one day people will realize that we should all have healthcare standard like many other countries.
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