H
e a r t S o n s & H e a r t D a u g h t e r s of A l l e n G i n s
b e r g
N
a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 4 : A r c h i
v e s E d i t i o n
ELIOT KATZ
Dear
President Obama, Congress, and the Mainstream Media:
Give
Us Single-Payer Health Care
The health insurance companies are a
cancer.
Remove them from the picture & the
national stress
level will go down 43%. Clogged arteries will
begin
to race. Dirty lungs will shower and take
a deep breath. Incurable liver-cancer cure
rates
will rise 32.92%. This damn back pain I feel
when walking was caused by Oxford hiring
Triad, Inc. as gatekeeper to avoid paying
chiropractic bills. My post-surgery knee pain lasted
months longer than needed because insurance
only
paid for cheapest physical therapy center in
town.
It would take a 300-page book, which I'm
going to write
one day, to tell my horror stories of trying
to get diagnosed & treated for the
fatigue, chills,
and spreading joint pains of Lyme disease
under
the watchful, half-closed eyes of the insureaucrats.
My file cabinet has announced its refusal
to hold any more
envelopes filled with HIP's
contradictory paperwork
instructions. These private health insurance
companies
are the reason high school reading
comprehension rates
are down all across America. Break the
insurance companies
of their habits and their holds and there
will be no more
reason for economic bubbles or preemptive wars.
I know that,
for an elected official, it must be
emotionally exhausting
to weigh the competing interests of the
impatient patients
and the dozing lobbyists whose concrete
boots are
ever-planted in Congress's roving halls. I
know
that, for a mainstream reporter to tell the
tale of a simple,
effective, and morally just solution to our health
care crisis
goes against the grain of everything taught
in our nation's
most expensively decorated journalism
schools. But try
to follow the mind's math. Poetry
statistics hardly ever lie.
[Originally
published in NHS 2012, http://www.poetspath.com/napalm/nhs12/.]