No medicare.. no problem.

|As I was drinking a free Chai Tea Latte from the new Starbucks today, I was thinking about how it was a great deal. Starbucks opens a new store and needs a good customer base, so they limit their losses, give away a load of free drinks, take donations and in the future see the promising results. Starbucks giving away freebies reminded me of a government making decisions on tax cuts and health care plans. They have the appearance of benefiting the entire public as time passes.. but this couldn’t be further from the truth. I’d always known the saying, “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer..” or something like that. I never really took that to heart but I decided to check out what was really going on in the world of govt. tax cuts and health care plans.

::sneezing: Check this out, if Bush’s complete health care agenda for his second term was carried out, as many as 10 million people who lack health insurance would be covered at a cost of $102 billion over the next decade, according to his campaign aides. Projections by the Congressional Budget Office, the Treasury Department, academics and the campaign’s website suggest that under the best circumstances, Bush’s plans for health care would extend coverage to no more than 6 million people over the next decade and possibly as few as 2 million. Later estimates from the same source report that only 600,000 would be newly insured. Aside from the complete falsehood of Bush’s projections, what does this have to do with, ‘The rich get richer and.. (etc.)?’ More and more people are becoming unable to get health insurance (which the Bush health care agenda wants to solve) because health care costs are going up and federal funding for medicaid is going down (which the Bush health care agenda is doing nothing about). This hurts the poor and middle class. Millions of people are unable to get health care and the number is growing faster than it can be helped. Since Bush’s election, the number of Americans without health insurance has climbed by 4 million. Here’s a quote from our executive:

“On the critical issue of health care, our goal is to ensure that Americans can choose and afford private health care coverage that best fits their individual needs …A government-run health care system is the wrong prescription. By keeping costs under control, expanding access and helping more Americans afford coverage, we will preserve the system of private medicine that makes America’s health care the best in the world..”

It’s true that about 3/4 of the population thinks there should be some kind of government-funded health care system.. however, according to the President, this is the wrong prescription though. How much does he really know about what the general population wants? President Bush is also wrong in his presumption that America has the best health care in the world. The U.S. has the worst health care system among industrialized nations with expenses much higher than any other nation. Coupled with tax cuts that only benefit the extremely rich. Take a look at Bush’s finalized tax cuts after the 2001 election. If you read the graphs thoroughly, you should be as amazed as I was in the cut difference between lower and middle-classes and those who are in the top %10. As it stands, rich people are doing fine, they hardly pay any taxes. They get fantastic medical care and continue to gain money because the government asks less of them. Don’t forget that the rich (who get richer) include the politicians which pass such legislation. It’s been said that you can easily predict policy by asking yourself, ‘Does it help the rich get richer or does it help everyone else?’ If it doesn’t help the rich or big corporations, it doesn’t matter. This is why ‘a government-run health care system is the wrong prescription.’ Because it doesn’t help the rich get richer and it would help the lower and middle-classes make immense progress in compensating for taxing and health costs.

I think it’s very unfortunate that everyday problems are being ignored by the highest level of government and that during election time president elects put on false fronts and make promises that they know will not be upheld. In my opinon, the United States has formal and powerful democratic institutions, that hardly work for the greater good. Social security and medicaid are being attacked and slowly pushed out of the national agenda, the current administration is running up the national deficit, and they’re leaving the problems to the general population and future administrations. Again, while it is unfortunate that the government is deliberately driving the country into an economic nightmare or worse yet, some kind of citizen uprising against the government, it’s more unfortunate.. that nobody cares.