Krugman: Americans, Uneducated or Not Do Not Realize Health Ins Co Need Government to Survive

Krugman: Americans, Uneducated or Not Do Not Realize Health Ins Co Need Government to Survive

Krugman points out http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/31/opinion/31krugman.html that Americans whether uneducated or not unfortunately do not realize that government helps even private insurance system work so it is easy for United Health Group to plant lies into Republican politician hands or in ads with impunity.

Since our current Healthcare system does poorly in actually treating people becoming obese or increasing blood sugar, we can look to a future of huge numbers of diabetes patients bankrupting our medical care system. Regrettably our Healthcare system rewards the number of medical treatments which hugely rewards doctors and hospitals, most of which are corporate owned, and the Health Insurance Industry which is richly rewarded by rejecting living saving treatments.

In our society, Americans have no feel for statistics.

My cousin said several decades ago she knows a couple of people who smoked all their lives and did not get cancer so she does not believe the reports. She has the conservative gene. Everyone does not get cancer, or big breasts from pesticides due to mutations, or dies from eating too much and becoming fat, but we have seen since the Reagan Era of Profits Uber Alles Greed, a mushrooming of overweight and especailly Obese Americans who now exceeds the number of overweight Americans. Coincidentally the number of diabetics also mushroomed! A large number of obese have Metabolic Syndrome which leads to diabetes and subsequent loss of kidneys and limbs for many and death from heart attacks.

Remember Polls are now done on the cheap, so the number of questions used to take a poll is too limited according to a former Gallup Pollster, David W. Moore. His book "The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls," shows that polls have been used to shape opinion by how they ask questions and what questions they ask. I normally ignore all polls except the Pew Polls People & Press has done a more thorough and fair job conducting polls with no political agenda. They found that telling the people the facts on both sides gave them a better ability to express their real knowledge based opinion.

Professor Mark Crispin Miller, a Communications teacher at NYU, said "A powerful argument that polls do not merely mkisinform us but pose a genuine, if subtle, threat to our democracy."

Crispin Miller also wrote a superb introduction for a re-issue of the 1928 book "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays, The Father of the Public Relations industry which shapes the mind of Americans through advertisements and manufactured "news." Bernays sold us the hearty breakfast, women smoking, and provided the basis for what we consume and think.

In the 1920s he was considered a God because professional school journalists thought that Americans are too stupid to get all the facts and interpret them correctly so they felt that propaganda was the perfect solution. Bernays lived over 100 and died in 1995 while writing still another book. His book helped Germans participate in the Holocaust and distructive wars which Hitler read while in prison and applied it well in the 1930s on.

Democracy Now www.democracynow.org with Amy Goodman has interviewed Wendell Potter formerly a "Communications" executive who used Public Relations (Propaganda) to shape the mind of Americans so that CIGNA could continue their Greedy drive to maximize profits by denying Healthcare, especially if the insured need life-saving expensive treatments and operations. When congress asked three Health Insurance Company CEOs to stop their recision policies, they refused. This provides plenty of reasons not to believe their ads or what they try to convince us is the truth about Healthcare costs and efficiencies.

Jim Kawakami

July 31, 2009

http://jimboguy.blogspot.com (Important Healthcare Blog just published.)