excerpt post 39
If health care doesn’t automatically translate into healthier societies, the obvious question becomes, then what does? Equality. People who live in more equal societies, epidemiologists have documented, live longer and healthier lives than people who live in more unequal societies.
But here’s the encouraging news: The just-passed health care reform package includes provisions that will help make the United States more equal. Some of these provisions are starting to receive considerable press attention. The health care reform package overall, New York Times analyst David Leonhardt noted last week, just may represent “the federal government’s biggest attack on economic inequality since inequality began rising more than three decades ago.”
Take a look at the chart below. It shows the budget for all the Federal departments. At the bottom of the chart you'll fine the Department of Health and Human Services.
It has a LARGER budget than the Department of Defense! We should already be the healthiest people in the world! (What the hell do they do, anyway?)
Dragging everyone down to the same abysmal level of healthcare is not going to make for a healthier society.
It will make for a society of equal unhealthiness.
Except for the elected elite who will not put themselves under the yoke of the healthcare system they want to impose on the rest of us unwashed masses.