Gil Smart writes in a Sunday News column “Give the people what they want”:
“Our political class as a whole, Democrats included, remains intent upon giving the people what they don’t want. We haul out the charts showing how Medicare will consume ever-more resources. In a review of Ryan’s plan, the Congressional Budget Office noted, ‘If revenues and federal spending apart from [Social Security and medical programs] remain near their past levels relative to GDP, the increase in spending on Social Security and the health care programs will lead to rapidly growing budget deficits and mounting federal debt.’
“But who says we need to keep allocating money as we always have? How about, for starters, we end the wars in Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, close our military bases in Germany and Japan and elsewhere, and put the savings toward these programs the people want?
“Isn’t it the job of the political class, in a democracy, to reflect and work to achieve what the people want?”
Yes, the military / industrial / lobbying complex spends as much money on our self appointed role of the USA being the police person of the world as just about all of the other nations in their world combineed spend on their military. To do so is their livelihood and wastes perhaps 3% of our Gross National Product (GNP) and sacrifices many of our young and the population of other nations. (Total military spending amounts to 6% of GNP.)
But we waste 6% to 8% of our GNP on our peculiar health system. France which has health care rated as the best in the world spends 11% on GNP, which is even high compared to other industrialized nations. We spend over 17%!
The only way we can protect our elderly (and thus their children upon whom they would otherwise depend) is to reform health care either through “Medicare for all” or an improved Obama Care based on what Geisinger, Mayo Clinic and Kaiser have been doing for years. We must merge our hospitals into our health care insurers so that the financial incentive is to keep the population healthy, not to encourage doctor visits and hospital stays.
The military / industrial / lobbying complex is no more venal than the leaders of our physician organizations, those running our ‘fee for service’ hospitals and the executives at our stand alone insurance companies. (Independent senator Joe Lieberman hobbled Obama care on pressure from Hartford insurance companies from his state of Connecticut.) In the good old capitalistic manner, they are having a feeding frenzy at the public trough. They are not only compromising our health (the USA is rated around 16th in the world) but they are bankrupting our nation.
If we can free ourselves from the clutches of the military and medical parasites, the USA can once again obtain rapid growth, eliminate deficit spending (as we did during the Clinton years) and provide for the needs of our people.
