Morning, Threaders, Threadheads, and all in between.
Coffee as usual. Black and hot.
Class war.
After recent events on all fronts I was left speechless for a couple of days. It’s beginning to look a lot like class war, isn’t it. It’s all it ever was. I used to think we had reached a point where things got so bad the time for change had come. I was wrong. But we’re getting there. Fast.
Living with disability in my family for the past nearly 20 years allowed me to see the Healthcare system in America decline. I witnessed first hand the transition from private insurance to Medicaid and the impact the ACA had in mitigating some of the worst aspects of a full blown for profit system that extends to the public sector. Now that we are headed for the end of those scarce ACA protections there will be no bottom left to reach.
I have said many times that there is no longer a middle class in the US, to which many reacted with incredulity and even anger. How dare I say “they” don’t exist? It’s called denial and it will go on for a while. The truth is this mythical middle class that started being extinct in the 1980s in plain sight is now made of people deeply in debt, who are one tragic event away from losing all they have. Their “safety net” is but their own families, not our society.
As we wrap our minds around the assassination of a Healthcare Insurance CEO this reality closes in quickly because, regardless of the motive for it, it illustrates the angst in our existing mindset. No matter the real reason for what happened most people saw it as payback, as revenge, as a blow against the system that CEO represents. It’s not reason to celebrate or cheer the perpetrator: it’s the fact no tears were shed and no sympathy was to be found for his victim.
The victim that represents all that is wrong in our country. All that has been wrong with it for many decades. It was, in our collective mind, the first shot fired in an up to now silent war. The class war. The most outrageous aspect of it has been and will continue to be the profit based Halthcare system and the fact it has a “business model” that infected the already broken public side of it. I often wondered how it can persist.
From my “business model” perspective it is idiotic to save thousands of dollars denying preemptive and palliative care only to spend millions dealing with its consequences. Sure it’s profitable to deny someone very expensive medication but it’s certain that will end up costing thousands of times more once their condition deteriorates so much it will take hospitalization and possibly surgery to try and fix it. So what’s the logic here? The logic is very few cases end like that.
The bean counters have it all figured out. The few people who survive this preemptive care denial nightmare will have to then navigate a mine field of appeals and resubmissions and hearings and it’s mostly all very high tech and efficient if you have the means and the knowledge to fight for your meager rights. Among those few, even fewer are capable of that. As for the even fewer that manage to survive after losing everything and still need surgery not to worry.
Those expenses are covered. By the rest of us. The business model is perfect. Not only they manage to get away with murder, they transfer the funeral bill to someone else. That’s why they don’t care about the risk of paying more for what could be taken care of for dimes on the dollar. They get to keep all the dimes and rarely have to pay the dollar in the end. Not to mention the “end” often is the patient’s own which results in savings for “the rest of us”. It is perfect.
Until it’s not. More and more people are starting to feel this tragedy in their lives because in today’s world being sick is becoming the norm. Around the healthcare system business model built for the healthy there are millions of other business models dedicated to make money by making us less healthy and more vulnerable to health risks - up to and including the other monster in play: the pharmaceutical industry. Which business model will fail first is irrelevant at this point.
Artificial intelligence is here, just in time to save those business models from mutual destruction. But who’s going to save us? Punisher types with silencers on their guns? The assassination of that CEO is not a solution, it’s a symptom. The truth is few of us benefit from the already scant protections afforded by the ACA through its expansions of Medicaid and many are reaching that dreadful point where life is lost before everything else is.
Cancer doesn’t wait for bankruptcy procedures and insurance transfers and renewed applications. Poverty will arrive after death comes and with it the supposed relief that 9 out of 10 times arrives too late. Maybe in time for some miserable end of life care, if you can make it through the admission process without any means of your own. This is America, now in a street near you. Class war is no longer some terrible event you see on TV. It’s outside your door.
At this point no one knows why that hooded guy found it necessary to shoot that (despicable) human being but we all know it feels warranted. We are becoming aware of what class warfare could look like from the other side of the business model our whole society was allowed to turn into. By us. That’s the immense tragedy of it all. We let it get this far. I suppose it was inevitable, though. It may be too harsh to lay the guilt at our own feet.
We are certainly to blame for not realizing this would be the outcome of years of denial and ignoring the facts, even playing along with hopes for the best without a care for the worst. But the guilty ones are people like that Insurance CEO. And they are finally scared shitless. The “haves” finally went too far and rely on too many “have nots” to live their luxury lives. Greed will soon tip the scale to the other side and it won’t be slowly and controlled like it tipped to their side.
It will be furious and devastating and it will affect us all, not just them. Someone said it’s too late for change to happen without a true revolution; that we are close to the collapse of the “empire” in a spiral of violence and destruction. Perhaps. The last threads holding it all together are about to be cut and if that happens, millions of people will be thrown into despair and they won’t have flat screens to watch the million dollar parties they used to dream of being at anymore.
They will show up at those parties, though. And they won’t be looking to eat cake. Can this tragedy be averted? Yes. But when Nero is about to reach power and his fiddlers are already tuning their instruments in Congress I think it’s safe to assume that, unless something extraordinary happens, Rome will burn to the ground before it can be rebuilt. That’s what class war does. It has been going on for many years and now it’s reaching its final stages. And I’m not fine with it.
