Single-Payer Healthcare – A BlackCommentator.com Series – Part 39 – Healthcare Future Shock: It’s Closer Than You Think

Complete development of financial products that integrate with insurance and health savings to provide “gap financing” on the spot in accordance with the patients’ medical credit rating, insurance coverage and health savings balance.

Anyone naïve enough to think that we aren’ t well along in this process need only think back to the days not so long ago when we all thought it absurd that personal computer would be commonplace in every home let alone in every 10-year-old’ s backpack.

So, that clerk in the hospital admissions office? Oh, he or she will perform an even more essential function shortly. Check-in for health care in this brave new world will mean providing one’ s Social Security card (still our most efficient national identifier) for a multi-step, all inclusive financial transaction: a credit check, an insurance benefits check, a healthcare savings account balance and finally a rapid-response consumer loan transaction to make sure we have the financing in place to be treated for whatever ails us. Don’ t make the grade? Well, I’ m sorry.

Don’ t like that future? Don’ t want that sterile, inhuman transaction? Well, then get off your rear-ends now and start fighting with us for the other healthcare vision that is still possible, though chances will grow dimmer if the current power players squeeze us out.

Presumptive (don’ t-cha love it) Presidential Candidates Obama and McCain don’ t tell us exactly what they envision in the future for healthcare. Candidate Clinton is a bit more clear. Take a look and take a listen and read the plans – which future do you see for patients in this nation?

Let’ s make sure we create a little pre-election noise and change those visions now. The healthcare industrial complex is not standing still and waiting for November or for January 2009. We must not either.

Join us in San Francisco on Thursday, June 19th, at noon in San Francisco, at 4th and Howard. We’ ll be gathering to protest the 38,000 (yes, 38 thousand) insurance industry executives and groupies gathered for the annual AHIP, American Health insurance Plans, conference. And in other cities around the nation, citizens will gather to protest – watch for details – join in and make noise.

We will be heard. We will not succumb to the forces that would turn a caring and compassionate and strong nation into a corporate playground – and most certainly not in our healthcare system.

We have seen the future and it must be ours…

To join the struggle for single-payer health care please visit Healthcare-NOW.org.