I live in a country full of people paid to try to kill me.
What I mean by this is that I have a severe illness in the United States of America. The people who are paid to try to kill me are those who work for health insurance companies.
The individual workers don’t know that they’re paid to try to kill me. They know only that they’re paid to follow the rules. And it is the rules that are formulated in order to kill me and all the sick people like me.
So my culture would rather I die than keep costing corporations money.
This preference (that I die rather than live) is funny, because the government wants me alive in order to keep paying taxes and adding some digits to a number they call the GDP. And my family, friends, and neighbors want me alive to love me and be loved by me. And others want me alive to write books for them and to help them out.
But the wishes of my government, family, friends, and readers are contrary to our culture. Our culture is a culture of death. It wants people that cost its owners money to die. And it wants everyone else to enrich its owners. That is its logic; its wishes are readily offered to anyone who asks this culture what it wants—and then listens.
The firm must live and grow. And in order for our health insurance companies to live and grow, the sick and costly people must die (or cease being born). So the rules get written to help workers kill them—by denying their requests for surgeries, medications, and for payment. But these rules are smartly written; they shield these workers from the consequences of their rule-following. If a sick person receives permission to get their medication late or never at all, the workers can blame the incompetence of the sick person’s doctors, the confusion of the software-based systems they use every day, and the general disorganization of the sick person in question (called the customer). If they had only followed all the rules in a timely way! The rule-follower may work and exist indefinitely without understanding the rules.
We in the United States of America believe that living and dying is a process that is primarily financial—that life is primarily about money. What we call our “health care system” is a massive killing machine whose function proves every second the seriousness of our belief that life is about money. The fact that the only place in which we don’t refuse to medically care for someone is the emergency room points to this belief: only in an emergency do we (temporarily) value the dignity of life over the fantasy of money. But as soon as your treatment is done, the bill will come.
This belief in the financial nature of life is a mark of a culture of death.
Money is inimical to life.
Money is inimical to life and rules that preserve money at the cost of health and life are evil. They are not unwise, impractical, or unethical; they are evil. They destroy life and make chaos. These rules are evil like the laws that allowed people to own other people. Health insurance companies and hospitals do not own chattel slaves, but they do cause people to accrue so much debt that they kill themselves, divorce their husbands and wives in order to keep coverage, and work jobs they hate in order to stay on employers’ plans. These rules cause people to choose drugs more likely to hurt them because the health insurance masters approve of those drugs and disapprove of others. These rules cause people to avoid certain doctors and caretakers because the masters would rather not pay them.
Every sick person in America has a part of their mind owned by health insurance companies. Part of my mind is dedicated to encountering and speaking in accordance with this evil. The health of my mind and body often relies on the approval or disapproval of my masters.
I need you to understand that this situation is real. You may not want to believe it—it is painful to know that evil exists and operates every moment with your permission, as it now does—but it is true. When you strip the euphemism away from language, you can so easily see that our society is organized lovelessness. And that killing is the world’s best business.
Until and unless people receive medical care proper to them without paying for it, we won’t be free of this evil. (Establishing a Medicare for All system will work against this evil.)
Until and unless people can democratically craft and change the rules dictating how and when medical care can be had, we won’t be free of this evil. (Forming direct democracies, not representative governments, will work against this evil.)
Until and unless we eliminate the spell of money from the surface of the Earth, we won’t be free of this evil. (Localizing your life will work against this evil.)
I need you to understand—but more importantly, I need your help. I need you to help me, help yourself, and help your neighbors respond to the only call that has ever mattered: the call to love.
