My best friend Kathy is doing a fundraiser for anti-rejection meds for her heart transplant. She didn’t believe me when I told her that a search of GoFundMe revealed dozens of fundraisers *for women named Kathy* *who are having heart surgery*. But it did.
https://www.gofundme.com/for-kathy039s-heart1 in 3 GoFundMe fundraisers are medical fundraisers. Approximately $650 million per year is raised on #GoFundMe every year for medical expenses. And that's only the *successful* fundraisers. If Kathy's is typical, most fall far short of their goals. What happens to those people?
We know the answer, but we whisper it. I'm not going to whisper it.
When people can't get #healthcare, THEY DIE. In every major country in the world, healthcare is part of the infrastructure in such a way that it is available to all.
Every country except the United States.
The United States doesn't effectively provide health care to *any* segment of the population, but its worst abuses are reserved for the working class and poor, especially those doing *just* well enough to not qualify for Medicaid.
This is deliberate policy, and it is genocide.
You would think, from the numbers of people begging for medical help on GoFundMe, that they don't have insurance. That's not usually the case. Kathy has insurance. She has Medicare, and a Medicare supplemental plan, comes from a middle class family, has worked a middle-class job her entire adult life, and yet a viral infection in her 20s has left her, at just over 50, looking at a shortened career and life and staring at a completely preventable death down the barrel of a health care system that puts the needs of patients *absolutely last* in the equation.
Why does US policy support this genocide of disabled and elderly and the working poor? It's part of the three-tiered system originally set up during slavery times to create a white supremacist oligarchy.
No, really. Hear me out. The system of white supremacy in the United States was never a two-tiered system, as many people assume. It was always three-tiered.
At the bottom, of course, were Black folk, slave and free, who were never intended to be able to break free but were *livestock* whose sole value to the owners was in their labor. To the extent that health care contributed to their labor, the owners have reluctantly provided minimal health care. Today, we give the more-or-less permanent underclass in the US, still disproportionately Black (and Native) the substandard care of Medicaid. It pays 100% or nearly of everything it provides, but what it provides is limited both in terms of services and providers.
In the middle tier, in the original scheme during slave times, are the poor whites. Their role is to provide labor that can't reasonably be provided by someone in chains, and to *enforce the chains of those below them*. To do this, it is necessary that they hate, envy, and despise those below them. There are many ways this is achieved, but one of these is by making it difficult or impossible for them to use their so-called "better" health care, which nominally has "better" providers and services, but is functionally often impossible to use because of unaffordable out of pocket expenses *after* very expensive premiums.
This pitting of the bottom and middle classes against one another, of course, benefits the wealth class. There's a trick to it, though. It is necessary that the middle-class believe that there is a wide, obtainable path to wealth for them, that wealth is largely a product of hard work and that the opportunity is available to all.
The path doesn't *actually* have to be wide and obtainable, it just needs to appear to be. And statistically, it's *not* wide and obtainable. Not only is inequality worse than in any stage in history, but so is social mobility. Still, the illusion is *critically important* to the preservation of white supremacy and the oligarchy of mostly white billionaires at the top. The illusion allows the middle-tier to think of themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" and align themselves with the interests of the wealthy rather than as another oppressed class and align themselves with those at the bottom. The wealthy are constantly stoking the divisions among and between those in the middle and bottom tiers to keep them attacking each other rather than uniting against the wealthy, to the point that now we have legions of paid trolls and bots, funded by individuals, governments, and corporations, devoted to that purpose in all the online spaces where humans congregate.
Which leads us back to why health care in the United States *deliberately and systemically stays unaffordable to the middle-class. If the middle-class were to have employment independent, reliable health care that costs very little out of pocket and is treated as infrastructure, the American middle class would have 1) much less to envy the poor for (because *damn*, even Medicaid is better than this)2) Freedom to leave jobs and demand more, because they aren't endangering the disabled and chronically ill people in their families and 3) time and energy to think of themselves as more than economic units for the benefit of the rich. 4) People who can count on health care can be illness touch nearly every family, and so long as your family has someone who is held hostage in this unbearable system, you will *stay in line*.
We do need one source health care. I frankly don't care what it's called or which of dozens of effective systems that are used in other countries, so long as out of pocket costs are limited for *everyone*, health care includes physical health, mental health, dental, vision, hearing, etc., and the system is employment-independent and doesn't have *different services and providers* based on wealth. So long as Americans like my best friend Kathy are no longer reduced to begging for the money to *stay alive* because completely treatable issues are priced in such a way that only the wealthy can afford to *live*.
She has raised only $500 of $20,000 so far in order to live. Can you help?
https://www.gofundme.com/for-kathy039s-heartThank you.
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