Submitted by Anne McCrady, Oct 9, 2007 15:52

The reason the healthcare industry is broken is because our system is built on corporate profits through illness and a better bottom line through selective coverage. We all pay for that, in taxes for medicaid and medicare, in higher premiums, in rising health costs to cover the uninsured and in expensive medical care for preventable conditions.

Though limited in its scope, the SCHIP program is a wake up call to America. If we chose not to keep our citizens healthy, especially our youngest ones, we can expect medical costs and insurance premiums to continue to rise. Worse, we have let private profit motives lead us down the path of a class war where poor children suffer most. AARP has stood up for the elderly, but there is no one to speak for children. Until we move to invest in the infrastructure of health by making quality healthcare accessible to everyone, more and more of us will find that for one reason or another, we fall below incomes needed to pay insurance company CEOs what they think they deserve.

Doctors and stateman know what the rest of the world has already figured out: the best way to have a healthy nation is to give everyone heathcare. Our reistance to this idea is folly.

SCHIP is just the opening salvo in what may be the most important democratic issue in decades. Are we a a nation of the people...or of the profits?

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