Street Kid, you are absolutely correct. You do not receive even a small fraction of the recognition you deserve for your relentless documentation of the Medicare D(eath) population reduction program.
And documentation is what it is. Obviously, if the mainstream American public wished low and no income elders and the infirm to have medical treatment, the US would not be the only industrialized nation in which medical treatment is a commercial product.
Yes, there has been a sustained and long-term inculcation of the doctrine that it should be a commercial product, the free market, supply and demand, and in America everyone is free to purchase all the medical treatment they can afford.
So deeply held, so cherished is this belief that as in the poignant incident that BoJo pointed out a while back, some individuals who find themselves in need of medical treatment but without the resources to purchase it will take their own lives rather than risk “being a burden” to their families, who might make extreme sacrifices in an attempt to buy a bit more life of a loved one, or buy that loved one’s way out of pain for a while.
There are those who will meekly accept that the value of their lives, on the free market, is simply less than the price of medical treatment, a high-profit industry, a luxury product. The price of freedom.
And there are even those who will, albeit reluctantly, and not without tears, accept that their beloved elder, a non-producer of profit, a non-generator of a significant revenue stream, must suffer and perish because their own labor is not valued by the market, by their countrymen, as anywhere near the price of that luxury product.
Their only comfort is that the beloved elder, and they themselves, are at least protected from “socialized medicine,” because America is a free country with a free market.
The price of this freedom is sometimes tragically high. But as long as the market, which includes them, values that doctrine enough to pay for it with their own blood, and that of their aged fathers and ailing infant sons, America will remain free from that socialized medicine.
We do not see people organizing groups to take shifts at local pharmacies to pay for medicine for seniors and disabled people who do not have the money to give to the insurance and pharmaceutical companies.
Nor do we see the politicians doing that.
There have been some obstructionist pharmacists who have defied American values and given away so many pills that they have lost their businesses, but they are just a small minority, an extremist fringe.
So, no, it is not likely that holding the policy in the faces of the public will cause an economic revolution, nor a political one.
There is simply not the will, nor the desire. We are talking here about a very low value population. It is for that reason that they have been slated for elimination in the first place.
But documentation has, for its own sake, a different kind of intrinsic value, a greater kind, a value made, like you who document, of finer stuff.
So please do not stop. You may think you walk the road alone, you may think no one sees, as the famous author put it, “the austere offices of love” that you recite, but if even one person, on reading your words, thinks, and having thought, goes to a pharmacy, a senior center, the home of a neighbor, and pays for the medicine of one “low value” person, it is possible that you will have been the catalyst for the saving of that one life.
And on the free market of morality and humanity, there is no higher value than that.
