To reduce healthcare costs and improve service healthcare must be Treated as a Utility. Trying to jam it into the "free market" paradigm guarantees market failure for those pieces of healthcare delivery that can be Treated as a market. And guarantees poor quality of life & death for the rest.
In addition to FDR's six Amendment proposals we esperately need:
We Democrats must make our charter more functional. A Second Bill of Rights is more important than ever!
I was listening to Randi Rhodes and she started talking about health care as a Utility and it hit me,
Almost all the great fortunes in this country come from people creating, developing, buying or stealing control over, goods of such importance that they are utilities! Henry George was defining the criteria for a Utility. His ideas would have powerful effect on the laws of the United States for the next 50 years.
They are so important that they need to be regulated and ruled in the public interest. And for private persons to own and make vast unearned fortunes off of them is piracy. At the same time, those providing the Utility to people, are important, and should be provided for and sustained in gratitude.
This is a simple, but powerful concept. And of course the concept has been a target for privateering recently!
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| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/utility |
This ought to be obvious. Windows is a Utility. So are the operating systems on your phone. And so are your phones and laptops. People should make a living from utilities. But not vast fortunes.
The Trumpian movement to create a Domestic Brownshirts force is moving along. Fortunately it's not attracting mass crowds because, maybe, rank an file Trumpeters might be figuring out that Trump is breaking his promises on health care, is a narcissist and serial liar. I don't have confidence, however, that Trump will fail. He has dedicated cadres of agents with links to the Russian Far Right, and maybe to Russian Intelligence.
Friends of mine constantly accuse various Democrats of being "neoliberal". The term has some definite meaning to it, and so I find their use of it to be sloppy, broad-brushing and usually defamatory. What it isn't is anything to do with the actual Democratic Party and it's ideology. It is a defamation of Democrats to call us "neo-liberal." The term has a real meaning and is used wrongly by those trolling us, who use it. They can call themselves intellectuals, but they are defaming the party and what it stands for when they call us that.
In the dialogue with the faux Christian right, there is no redemption. There is little talk of forgiveness, redemption or mercy - much less of humility, love or repentance. They also seem to ignore the Gospels.
