A Conversation About Health Care with WEMF’s ‘The Young Jurks’

Progress Pond’s Brendan Skwire speaks with WEMF’s The Young Jurks about how the American health care system failed a friend.

I posted yesterday about Ken Jacobs, a friend of mine who died over the weekend. It must have struck a chord with quite a few people, because by the end of the day I was invited to discuss his passing on WEMF’s The Young Jurks, a podcast that deals with (among other topics) progressive politics.

You can listen in here.

Thanks to host Mike Crawford for having me on!

Author: Brendan Skwire

Brendan Skwire is a cultural and media critic. He offers nearly two decades of experience as a journalist, video editor, blogger, and community organizer. Skwire has worked for the Philadelphia Weekly, Scrapple TV, and Raw Story, and is a former member of the News Guild.

One thought on “A Conversation About Health Care with WEMF’s ‘The Young Jurks’”

  1. By far the very best paper that attempts to really explain our healthcare mess, that I have ever seen is this paper by the late Nicholas Skala. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.405.5725&rep=rep1&type=pdf You can skip the first page or two, that is just the typical scholarly paper intro. Needless to say his hunch, his worst case scenario turned out to be true. One thing that he left out however is the “governmental authority exclusion” which is composed of two separate definitions for the same thing, one is in Article I:3 b+c of the General Agreement on Trade in Services, and the other one, the one for services that are completely subsidized out of the taxpayers dime, is in the Annex on Financial Services. These both amount to hidden traps. (There also is a Note by the WTO Secretariat that was published in the end of 1998, its document number T/C/W/50 on the WTO site, but it will probably be incomprehensible to most people. Suffice it to say that only totally free services with no competition have a change of escaping this trap, and then only if we either follow the Article XXI procedure or dump the whole shabang and call it what it is a fraud on our nation that directly conflicts with democracy, that has turned our country into a parody of its once great self..

    Somebody needs to explain both of those, the paper and the essay, at least.., well, to both the US and UK. If they had, both Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn would have won their respective contests. But neither of them told the public about this crucial fact, why not? If you understand it, you’ll realize that the entire issue revolves around the core concept, governments are not allowed to compete with a business, no matter how crappy its offerings are. So we really are being sacrificed, literally on the alter of ideology. People are dying and will continue to until we understand whats being done and how. No, its not simply about voting for more Democrats because some of them are not really Dems so much as neoliberals with a totally corporate agenda that is against democracy. They view it as majoritarianism and feel as if they have a right to lie to get what they want which in their case is control. Putting the world in a race to the bottom rather than a race to the top that would eventually threaten their ever growing wealth. So now we are stuck in a huge mess.

    There is a little known WTO dispute that is very important, DS503. Filed in March 2016. Its a little known case that would create legal precedent over the entire world.

    Its not about visa fees, its about quotas. Its basically about the future of the middle class. Can we continue to have a middle class. Can we pay people better here than the lowest bidding firm, whomever they are and wherever they come from because thats the deal.

    Pray for us. We’re so naive and stupid. This is the biggest con job ever, there cannot be any dispute over that. So why is everybody acting like its a done deal? Even though , officially it was, taking effect in the 1990s. Thats right, we’re not deciding healthcare now it was decided more than two decades ago.

    Thats the facts, you can verify it with the global economic governance organizations. So welcome to the real world. Now you can start understanding the situation.

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