Health Care and Politics.
And like a bad nightmare, corporate greed is hear.

We are trading places with what we once called 3rd world nations.


When I was in Africa I got really sick in Mana Pools on the Zambezi river.
As a white person with money I got carried passed the hoards, dying of AIDS, up stairs to a privet room.
On a tour of Alta Bates on 06/26/97, I was given the distinct impression by Ron Marshal, a vice president at Alta Bates, that the majority of patients taken to Alta Bates Emergency were the hoards.
With the hoards getting bigger he would like to bring them all , to a nice new 7 bay emergency room on the most congested block of the most congested road in Berkeley.
Oh yeah and part of the reason this existing little emergency room is inadequate is because, Sutter CHS the company that owns Alta Bates, Closed the only other emergency room in Berkeley......
Oh yeah and this consolidated emergency room is about ¼ mile from the Hayward fault line.
So the CITY of Berkeley now has only one emergency room ¼ mile from the Hayward fault, for ECONOMIC reasons like.
The board of Sutter CHS would like to increase their compensation! I guess $1.2 MILLION just is not enough for the top dog at that non profit .
If this disturbs you, GOOD, go here and find out who your representatives are. Then send them a letter about how absurd it is for board members of non profits to be compensated 7+ figures. ALSO
Copy the letter below (click and drag and then Ctrl+C on a pc) and then click on the link below. The text has alredy been formated to fit nicley in the space provided for a letter to the first lady.

EMail the First Lady

Health care was supposed to be one of your primary issues, but I think you attacked it in much the same way the western medical system attacks illness: you attacked the symptoms.

What, however, is the real cause of the health care crises in this country? I can't start my own company because I can't afford the insurance. I know that even as a member of a company group with prescription coverage I do not come close to spending as much as the company is sending in for my coverage. So why do I get such a hard time about getting my insurance company to pay for things? Well, it's directly related to orders of magnitude.

What is an order of magnitude? (answer: a tenfold-difference) An order of magnitude is the difference between 1 and 2 (no order) and 11 and 12 (one order of magnitude). Two orders would be 1 and 2 V.S. 101 and 102. Three orders of difference would be say $20,000 or $80,000 V.S. $20,020,000 or $80,080,000. In some cases people at the heads of insurance companies earn 4 orders of magnitude (9 figures total) above the people they are denying coverage to because of some twisted clause their 5 or 6 figure lawyer put in to the plan.

So how much medicine would just 10 Million dollars buy? As a !!! PUT YOUR JOB HERE !!! I can't tell you but my guess is, QUITE A BIT.

Wont to fix it? Take the PROFIT OUT OF HEALTHCARE! Limit the COMPINSATION of NON PROFIT BOARD MEMBERS.

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This is an excerpt from a book by Gerry Spence called "From Freedom To Slavery, The Rebirth Of Tyranny In America". Specficly an excerpt from http://www.skypoint.com/members/jlogajan/files/spence.txt
... A new king was crowned when we capitulated to a regime that is no longer sensitive to people, but to non people--to corporations, to money and to power. ...

...In this country we embrace the myth that we are still a democracy when we know that we are not a democracy, that we are not free, that the government does not serve us but subjugates us. Although we give lip service to the notion of freedom, we know the government is no longer the servant of the people but, at last has become the people's master. We have stood by like timid sheep while the wolf killed, first the weak, then the strays, then those on the outer edges of the flock, until at last the entire flock belonged to the wolf. We did not care about the weak or about the strays. they were not a part of the flock. We did not care about those on the outer edges. They had chosen to be there. But as the wolf worked its way towards the center of the flock we discovered that we were now on the outer edges. Now we must look the wolf squarely in the eye. That we did not do so when the first of us was ripped and torn and eaten was the first wrong. It was our wrong.

That none of us felt responsible for having lost our freedom has been a part of an insidious progression. In the beginning the attention of the flock was directed not to the marauding wolf but to our own deviant members within the flock. We rejoiced as the wolf destroyed them for they were our enemies. We were told that the weak lay under the rocks while we faced the blizzards to rustle our food, and we did not care when the wolf took them. We argued that they deserved it. When one of our flock faced the wolf alone it was always eaten. Each of us was afraid of the wolf, but as a flock we were not afraid. Indeed the wolf cleansed the herd by destroying the weak and dismembering the aberrant element within. As time went by, strangely, the herd felt more secure under the rule of the wolf. It believed that by belonging to this wolf it would remain safe from all the other wolves. But we were eaten just the same.