Off Topic - Health Care Reform

This post is completely off topic, but I cannot remain quiet on this issue. As some of you have deduced, there is a reason behind my occasional sniping on health care reform.

As someone with a potentially life threatening illness that requires constant surveillance and long-term chronic care, the fact that I have gone from a health care "have" to a health care "can't get" makes this a deeply personal issue for me.

The truth of health care and its reform has become obliterated by the hyperbolic rhetoric from all parties to this debate. There are some simple facts that any critically thinking person cannot ignore regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum:

• 47 million people, that's almost 1 in 5 of all Americans, are without any form of health insurance.
• We ALL pay for the emergency room delivery of health care to the uninsured. This is far more expensive than devising a system of delivering basic health care to all people regardless of socioeconomic status.
• 18,000 people with chronic diseases, like me, die every year in America, the richest nation on Earth, because they can't get health care. 18,000 people is 6 (SIX) times the number of people who died on 9/11/2001. The U.S. has spent over a trillion dollars on the war on terror. The state of American health care is a FAR GREATER threat to the long-term economic health and physical security of our nation.
• If you believe in pure capitalism, as the right wing of the Republican party claims to do, there is nothing pure about the brand of capitalism practiced by the insurance industry. If, as the Public Option would seek to do, the supply and demand equation was restored to the insurance industry we would ALL benefit economically.

I do not want to go on a diatribe. I do not want to contribute to the hyperbole. If, as the richest nation on earth we cannot deliver health care to all our citizens, shame on us all.