The other day, I came across a wonderful op-ed piece in the Mountain Mail newspaper of Socorro, New Mexico, by a man named Rick Coddington. The article is titled, “Paid-Off Politicians Set To Stick It To Us Again.”
Here are some salient excerpts:
If you caught last week’s column, you know I was traumatized by watching the movie “Sicko†by Michael Moore. It was traumatic because it rocked the foundations of my core beliefs that “socialized medicine†ala Canada and England were the worst things in the world.
I had known about the movie for a long time and would have never watched it because, after all, it was made by Moore, who I considered to be lower than pond scum. Still, rather than face the possibility of being stupid about something, I actually coughed up three bucks and endured the irritating and boring style of Moore and came away “with a different point of view†(as Johnny Cash once sang).
Now I am looking at the possibility that I had fallen hook, line and sinker for a load of lies from my peeps in the conservative movement. To try to decide where the truth lies, I started looking up on the Internet what Canadians say about their supposedly terrible health-care system. Another eye opener –- mostly they love it. That’s not because they are idiots, it is because they evidently really do get much better care than their stupid neighbors to the south…
Everything bad we have been told about “socialized medicine†is covered in the movie. Examples: long waits for service – lies; crummy, underpaid doctors – lies; unavailability of quality drugs – lies; hidden costs – lies; unaffordable, nation-bankrupting costs – lies.
Speaking of costs … if you read my column much, you know I buy drugs from Canada for pennies on the dollar. Even with prescription drug coverage, I can buy –- outright –- drugs from Canada for less than the co-pay costs to get them here!
What does that tell you about the cost of prescriptions? It tells me the drugs actually cost less than the insurance co-pays! If you look at the “list price†of the drugs, you can see (in some cases) the profit is 300 to 400 percent!…
The only difference in the drugs is the profit. The Canadian pharmacy from which I have been buying for years is obviously making money. In contrast to that, if you come down to the good-old U.S., not only are we paying three or four times what the drugs are worth, we are being taxed into oblivion to “bail out†the poor corporations that would just go broke if we tax-saps weren’t shoveling money to them.
What is all this really about? Profits and greed. Outrageous, mind-boggling greed. It’s about CEOs who pay themselves hundreds of millions of dollars to … what -– lose money? They aren’t losing anything personally! That handful of insiders is getting obscenely rich when the rest of us are suffering loss.
They are able to do this with one simple talent. They bribe politicians.
Can I get an “amen”?
