Human Life vs. Profits

That seems to be the shape that today's random thoughts on the health care debate are taking.

I didn't see the president's speech yesterday, and I haven't really read much of the analysis. So these are just observations of the "debate" as it has shaped itself over the past couple of months.

Death panels. We already have them, as I'm sure I'm not the first to point out. They are not part of the government. They are run by Blue Cross-Blue Shield, Aetna, United HealthCare, (fill in the name of your insurance company here). And they have nothing to do with end-of-life counseling. They aren't even panels. They are bean-counters in some office somewhere who get bonuses for canceling your coverage when you get seriously ill. Get that: they get a bonus for letting you die.

(There are horrifying stories of the lengths they will go to, in fact. I ran across one the other day that I can't find now, but a woman cme down with a serious illness and the insurance company searched until they found something that her husband had forgotten to list as a "pre-exiting condition" -- and dropped them both. If I ever see that story again, I'll link to it, but I haven't been able to find it.)

Ran across this post by Amanda Marcotte via Dday at Hullaballoo.

There is only one argument against the public option---or for a trigger, really. That argument is that companies that are in the business of denying care should not be required to compete with a non-profit government entity in the business of providing care. The idea that the already wealthy are too delicate to have to compete is a politically stupid message most of the time, but right now, it’s particularly ugly, since the rest of us are feeling that climbing unemployment keenly, and the knowledge that we have to compete---not just for extra money but for our very lives---is unlikely to make us sympathetic to super-rich people who will be fine even if they lose this competition.

See item one, about "death panels" and how they actually work.

I think Marcotte has actually focused on the core of the real debate, the one that no one wants to talk about:

The people who value human lives over corporate profits aren’t the ones who should be required to explain ourselves. Our argument is sound. We believe all people are equal, and that the rich’s wallets are therefore not more important than your lives. We’re the ones who stick by the principles of our founding documents, and we’re the ones who steadfastly maintain that human life is valuable, even if the human holding it isn’t a rich insurance company executive.

It’s the people who are putting corporate profits ahead of human lives who need to explain themselves. They’re the ones who should be asked why corporate profits count more than lives. They’re the ones who should be asked why working class citizens should be forced to decide between paying for an insurance bill or paying their rent in order to make sure that no insurance company executive goes without a fresh supply of yachts and fancy cars. They should be forced to explain why insurance company executive yachts count more than your ability to avoid homelessness, or your ability to have a perfectly treatable illness actually treated. (If you think that laws against rescission will stop the practice, keep kidding yourself. The fines will be low enough to count as the cost of doing business.) Instead of asking why “the left” is so unreasonable, let’s start asking why everyone else thinks human lives count less than rich people’s dollars.

I think the one thing that frosts me the most about the right as it's presently constituted is that everything is more important than people. That's really the thrust of the corporatist philosophy, and as far as I can tell, that's the whole basis of libertarianism, which is why I consider both to be morally bankrupt. Please understand -- not all rich people are like this. I know many who are exemplary humanitarians and plow significant proportions of their resources back into the community. But it seems that when we're talking about corporations -- well, corporations don't have any moral sense. I thought everyone knew that.