The Fast-Food-Health Care-Insurance Complex

Eisenhower waited until the end of his presidency to give the famous military-industrial complex speech and look what good it did: America went on to immerse itself in Vietnam, Iraq, and now Afghanistan. The fast-food-health-care-health insurance complex is just as real, more threatening to American lives, and even more complex. It's one of the best examples of the trees obscuring the forest except when I start to ponder the derivation of derivatives. No one, not even Obama, can make a speech that can effectively explain the nuances of this insidious complex in a way that will convince the American people that they have been had, hoodwinked, and huddled by another deceptive complex.
However, the difference between a conspiracy and a complex is that a conspiracy is intentionally designed by conspirators while a complex grows organically. A complex becomes so pervasive you can't trace its evolution to a single starting point. Much the way an ecosystem evolves, a complex develops by companies or even whole industries finding niches in the complex and protecting those niches even at the expense of the whole. Of course a complex has an insatiable appetite that is ultimately unsustainable. In contrast ecosystems, if left on their own, sustain themselves.
The fast-food-health-care-insurance complex has brought America to its knees. It started about the time Eisenhower gave his last speech (1960). Its casualties are so pervasive we can barely see them. They are the overweight, artery-clogged, American children and adults who have bought their fool’s gold piece of the American Dream piecemeal in the form of Big Macs, KFC chicken, Whoppers, Baconators, and fries. They have been “educated” by TV commercials to satisfy their voracious appetites and shrinking wallets with the greatest life-threatening diet known to western civilization, thanks to the dollar menu and the drive thru.
Meanwhile, health care and insurance companies have been able to cherry-pick their clients and eventually exclude the high risk ones, all of whom pay increasingly higher insurance rates over time. The excluded are often dropped when their employers switch health insurers, a neat trick to lower the risk to insurance companies. The retained find themselves paying higher and higher premiums each year because of the exorbitant interventions practiced by the health care providers in order to compete for investment dollars from shareholders by showing greater profits. Thanks to the premiums insurers are able to charge and the deductibles they are able to set, insurers make a fine profit whether you need an intervention or not. The rates and deductibles always favor the insurance company stockholders at the expense of the insured.
America has always been about freedom. The most dubious freedom we have acquired, over the years, is the freedom to be simple-minded. That characteristic requires that life remain simple and that politicians explain things in simple terms. No complex answers to complex problems, thank you. Just make things right or better without changing anything. Change is scary, especially coming from a black man who happens to be President. America is also about faith. Just have faith in free markets, God, or your talk show host, and things will turn out for the best. Just don’t listen to anyone talking real change. That’s too scary. And keep that black man from talking to my kids at school.
We need to address America’s health before we address its health care, or at least make it a large part of what we do first. If the government would stop subsidizing the beef industry, for example, the price of burger would go up, the dollar menu would disappear, and folks would be forced to eat more vegetables, thus making people healthier. However, this would hurt the beef industry, the health care industry, and the insurance companies just as failing to go to war would hurt our arms-producing strategic industries such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc. The artery-clogged, obese bodies would disappear, thus creating less demand for expensive interventions, and thereby reducing the profits of stockholders in health care and health insurance companies.
Putting all of that in simple terms will require an oratorical skill far beyond anything any president has ever demonstrated. Eisenhower offered his vision but too late to do anything about it himself. When Obama offers his own health care plan, he will have time to act. I wish Obama the best of luck spelling out in plain English the nature of the problem so that his solution makes sense. However, this health complex is a multi-headed dragon that needs a multi-nuanced strategy to overcome it. But the right wing fear mongers have labeled Obama a socialist “dragon” and that dragon is easier to focus on and believe exists than one with many heads.
How anyone can have absolute faith in a free market system today in the wake of the most recent debacle is truly astounding. The market system needs a referee with teeth. Government is the only logical choice in that regard. But let’s start with subsidizing spinach, tomatoes, and peppers instead of beef and corn. That move alone would do more for America’s health than all the fixes we can make to health care and insurance. The agri-business lobby as it exists today does more to harm American health than any other single factor.
A way government can help educate America about its role in their lives and what it is trying to accomplish is to offer health and civics classes taught by AmeriCorps teachers to retiring citizens much the way driver’s education classes help reduce auto insurance premiums. If you want to get a bonus benefit from Social Security or Medicare, take a class and you’ll receive a one- time small bonus. That way, people will be able to have access to facts rather than be manipulated by pure irrational fear. If nothing else, they’ll realize that Medicare and Social Security are both “socialized” programs.