More and more of the world’s wealth is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, and younger people are being subtly propagandized that it’s the fault of a growing elder population living longer and costing them a growing percentage of their paychecks. Well, could that be because medicine has become almost exclusively a for-profit “industry”?
It costs me a week’s pay to spend two hours in the dentist’s chair and he tells me, “This little cable costs $600!” It probably costs $20 to manufacture. But no one says, “That’s too much!” They just pass it on. The argument that people insist on more and more expensive tests and treatments is absurd. The tests and equipment are priced at astronomical markups from what it costs to make them, and the attitude of the manufacturers is, “Insurance pays for it.”
The real cause of abject poverty is uber-wealth. Too much money in too few hands. Maybe all the large corporations should be compelled to split their stock 2 for 1, and then combine 50 percent from all of them into a pool that every non-wealthy citizen of the world gets an equal portion from. To me the American Way isn’t complicated. It’s just one phrase: A Level Playing Field. If things don’t move that way soon, in another 20 years we’re going to metamorphose from gated communities back to walled cities, to keep the poor at bay. Check back with me on that one.
Jim Dodds
Waitsfield
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