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Our Mental Health Problem

William (we call him "Bill") McGuire's compensation
from United Health Group (owner of United Health Care)
was 1.7 billion dollars over a ten-year period.

Let us assume that Ol' Bill never took a day off.
Over that ten-year period, Ol' Bill earned
almost half a million dollars a day.  He was paid
$1,000,000. one thousand seven hundred times. 

Now, these numbers may be off just a tad,
but they help explain what is going on.

We are the only industrialized nation in the world
that does not provide universal health care. 
Millions of our citizens are not covered by health care.
Some of them get emergency medical care,
and the people who do pay for health insurance
have to pick up that cost.  It is stupid, but
it is a system that has made a lot of money
for Ol' Bill and lots of other people hawking
health insurance.  (Health insurance is not the same
as health care.  Health insurance is the way
we ration health care.  Bill understood that.)

The insanity is that we pay almost exactly
twice as much per person for health care
and health insurance as all of those other nations
that do provide universal health care. 

Ours is a great system, what! 

Right now Ol' Bill is over on Lake Minnetonka
renovating some of his houses on the Lake. 
Bill is a careful investor.  He squeezes the small
contractors for all he can get.  Bill knows a buck!
He knows about 1,700,000,000 of them!

I admitted, recently, that I tried to listen to
Sunday morning talk shows--you know, just
to get my head screwed on straight about
health care, and what Barack Obama is doing wrong,
and several other incidental secrets of life. 

I turned them off.  They weren't real people.
They had names, but they weren't real people.

I have a suggestion that might help us keep perspective.
Instead of giving the wise men from the east names,
we should put placards in front of them that show
how much they earn a year, and what their net worth is,
and where most of that money came from.
Not to do that is like asking William McGuire
for his advice about how to handle health care.

The insurance companies are not opposed to universal
health care.  In fact, they would be happy as pigs in
a sty on a hot day if the government would give the
money to pay for health insurance for everybody!
Not health care for everybody.  Health insurance.

The insurance companies don't want to insure
people for pre-exisiting conditions.  That is no way
to make money!  And they sure as hell don't want
to have to insure people with long-term illnesses.
It would be just fine if government would screw up
enough socialistic courage to take care of those cases,
and let the insurance companies take care of what
they do best:  bleed the system;  reward all of the
other Bill McGuires still working the system. 

There is a serious mental health problem at the heart of
our debate about health care.  We are out of our minds!

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