Thom Hartmann asks a question that we should all ask? Why is there so much poverty in a land of plenty? Why is there such disparity in access to medical care? Why do working class people vote to elect a billionaire who is surrounded by other billionaires? Why did they think he had their best interests at heart when he has no heart?
Thom begins:
Welcome to America’s sickest reality show — where families turn to crowdfunding for cancer treatments while billionaires hoard obscene wealth. In no other developed nation do sick children depend on charity to survive, but here, it’s just another episode of our rigged system…
Consider the ubiquitous ad for the company that buys life insurance policies. The senior citizen in the ad says something to the effect of, “We learned that we could sell our policy when a friend did so to pay their medical bills.”
Wait a minute: we live in the richest country in the world, with the richest billionaires in the world, and we have people who must sell their life insurance policies — depriving their middle-class kids of an inheritance — because somebody got sick?
That sure isn’t happening in most European countries, Canada, Costa Rica, Japan, Taiwan, or South Korea.
While every year over a half-million American families are wiped out so badly by medical debt that they must file for bankruptcy and often become homeless, the number of sickness-caused bankruptcies in all those countries combined is zero.
Another ad is for a company that sells “reverse mortgages” that let people strip equity out of their homes to cover living and medical expenses. Tom Sellick is a nice guy and all, but are there really that many seniors who are now destitute and thus must wipe out their largest store of wealth just to retire? And how much worse will this get as Elon Musk guts the Social Security administration?
Then there’s the ad for the Shriner’s hospital for children. One of the kids in the ad says to the camera that she was able to walk “because of people like you!” Here in American we must resort to crowdfunding medical care for children with deformities and birth defects? What the hell?
Why aren’t we all funding cancer cures and help for disabled for kids with our tax dollars? With, at the very least, the tax dollars of America’s billionaires?
Oh, yeah, that’s right: billionaires in America pretty much don’t pay income taxes any more, and haven’t since Reagan.
That ad is often followed by one for colostrum, a milk product that is supposed to help the immune system, with the ad’s pitch-lady saying something like, “There are over 90,000 chemicals in our environment that haven’t been tested for toxicity…”
And, damn, she’s right.
Open the link and finish the article if you want to learn more.
