First, We’ll Screw The Armed Forces, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #110

March 23, 2009 Mike Gold 1 Comment

To be fair, the conservatives are right about one thing: there’s no way we’ve got the money to pay for President Obama’s entire social agenda. As worthy as it is, we don’t have the resources to fund 100% of the shopping list.

Barack’s already started to cut, quietly and in a most unfortunate place. He wants to cut our armed forces from the VA health roles if –note, if – they have access to private insurance. This is a really lousy place to cut.

Whatever you think about our sundry wars, including the present escalation in Afghanistan, let’s appreciate the sacrifice being made by the men and women of our armed forces and of their families. With battlefield care improving, we have more veterans in need of long-term care than ever before: vets who, in previous wars, would have died in combat. The only problem with the VA hospitals (compared to other hospitals) is they tend to be in urban areas, and vets in non-urban environments have a hard time getting care.

Obama’s plan will make it all the harder.

I understand the politics of the situation. Barack is using this to leverage his universal health insurance plan. Hey, we wouldn’t want to screw our vets, would we? But the idea of screwing the vets just so we can unscrew them later, maybe, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Not all programs work out the way they should – although a great many work out fine – and this is one game that’s just immoral to put into political play.

It’s a bad roll of the dice. We know Big Pharm and Big Med and the insurance mafia are going to deploy every trick arrow in their huge quiver to kill universal health care. Once again, we are going to hear the ridiculous cry of “socialism.” We’re going to hear the ridiculous claim that Canadians have universal health care and they are dying in droves, despite the fact that the poor in Canada get better health care than the wealthy do in the United States.

Sure we can trade horror stories all day long, but we do not, by any stretch of the imagination, have “the best health care in the world.” For an industrialized nation compared to other industrialized nations, our health care sucks. You get what you can afford, maybe, and too many families have to choose between bankruptcy and critical care of a family member.

So let’s leave our vets out of this fight. It’s the very least we can do for them.

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Mike’s Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind rants can be heard every Monday and Friday on The Point podcasts, available right here at www.michaeldavisworld.com, as well as at comicmix.com, getthepointradio.com, zzcomics.com, and ravenwolfstudios.com. You can subscribe to The Point at iTunes by searching under “The Point Radio.”