In another channel of the “Aint’What They Say” thread, I’d like to jump into another phrase or group of phrases that create a ton of misaligned arguments, without addressing the root cause. Affordable Care Act.
You see it, you hear it, but you can’t really process it. Affordable Healthcare, Universal Healthcare, and other terms get floated to the masses under the guise of helping everyone get affordable health care… I mean, it’s in the name, right? Wrong. Costs of health care to working adults in this nation have skyrocketed since the introduction of the ACA. Provider choice has also dwindled as the approved courses for treatment and those reimbursed for treatment have narrowed.
As a functioning, gainfully employed member of society the cost of insuring my family rose to nearly $1600.00 per month in 2020. Ironically, when I was booted from corporate America at the beginning of Covid, I discovered MediShare, a group that while not insurance, met the government demand for insurance and allowed us to stay “legal” to avoid tax penalties. Want more irony, the longer I searched for work, the more we looked at other options and found that we could sign up with California for free while I looked for work. Is this why when I was employed I paid $1600.00?
Ask yourself, how does applying tax penalties to someone that cannot afford insurance help make healthcare affordable? The results of ACA tell us that it was never about providing Affordable Healthcare options. If it were, there would have been different avenues taken to make healthcare affordable, not penalized.
Let’s start with a basic. How much do your neighborhood hospitals charge you for a Tylenol during an overnight stay? I know this will vary greatly, but when my wife and I were having our daughter, her employer made a paperwork mistake with the insurance that sent us into negotiations with the hospital. This is where I learned that they were charging $8.00 per pill, for Tylenol. For $8.00, I can buy the jumbo bottle at Walgreens, unless I am in Northern California and the shoplifters took it all. Three years later, and in a different city, we had my son. Tylenol was up to $12.00 a pill. So I am seeing a 50% increase in cost with no adjustment to the product. This is the difference between 2004 and 2007. What is the cost of a single Tylenol at the hospital in 2022?
I have friends that are diabetic. If you’ve seen the ups and downs of Insulin pricing and the direct effect it has on those families, your heart begins to break just a bit. Then if you are like me, you start to get analytical. How many of these diabetes cases are hereditary, and how many are the result of poor lifestyle choices? Whoops. Are we gonna go there? Yep. Why can Americans struggle to eat right (so they believe) and still get so ill? Why can we travel to other countries, eat and drink our fill, and lose weight while struggling not to gain it here? This is a phenomenon I have experienced firsthand and led me to buy into all the food conspiracy nonsense.
So regardless of how the diabetic got there, they got there. There is a lot of them too. So what does our leadership do to help them? Goose egg. What is our leadership doing with billions of dollars in regards to healthcare though? They are trying to get every citizen to take an experimental shot to combat a virus that has devolved into cold-like flu (According to Bill Gates). They are ramping up with millions of shots to combat Monkeypox which to many Americans is simply amusing. What they aren’t doing:
- Addressing the Food Supply Chain in a productive way
- Limiting the use of GMO and stressing natural foods
- Providing contemporary messaging on healthy lifestyles
- Addressing the root cause of expense in healthcare
- Removing themselves from profit-driving ventures in healthcare
- Increasing the availability of fresh produce to “Food deserts” – areas that primarily consume processed foods (i.e. poor neighborhoods)
- Opening parks and public facilities to activity providers – make it easy to get people active
My mother is from a nursing background and is out of the industry now. When the pandemic broke out, I was very skeptical of everything the Media, Government, and Mainstream Medical pushed on us. My mother pleads with me to get the vaccine, to mask, to isolate. As the vaccine was getting ready to be released, she said “Thank God, we will finally get the vaccine and be able to put all of this behind us.” That led to a lengthy discussion and one in which I could voice my thoughts derived from Critical Thinking.
Mom, why have they not told people to get active? Why are they closing parks and beaches when outdoor activity is the best thing to get the body prepared for battle? Why are they not talking about Vitamin C, Zinc, Vitamin D, and the benefits of Ivermectin and Clorouquine? This was long before I understood the correlation between “Emergency Use Authorization” and alternative solutions. I also asked my mother “When was the last time the government cared so much about something that they would not only give it to you but incentivize you with cash payouts?”. That conversation solidified my stance in my mind, and I could tell it had an effect on my mother as well.
All of this to say – It Ain’t What They Say it Is.
If affordable healthcare was the goal, there would be affordable measures put in place. The emphasis would be on overall health, fitness, and diet. There would be campaigns to educate and influence healthy decisions. The acts that the government has employed before to regulate the ceiling cost of certain goods would be exercised at the medical level. A Tylenol at a premium cost could be what? seventy-five cents? When big pharma spends ten dollars to make something they sell for $2500.00 – that is not capitalism, it is corruption. The corruption becomes evident when you follow the dollars to find that the advocates for Affordable Healthcare are in the payout line.
When our citizens (that can afford it) are traveling for medical tourism because services are so drastically cheaper outside our borders… you know it’s rigged. Worse, when these tourists get interviewed they also discuss the elevated level of treatment they received as well. Double whammy.
