Cricket, Health and other issues.

The cricket test between NZ and India ended one day earlier than expected so I had a day to do other things. I had just had my three monthly medical checks by my wonderful diabetic nurse ‘Jackie’ who had checked my weight, feet, and lungs, sight etc…she gave me a pass mark. For now my health care was free…well almost free, but not if Key and his cronies get their way.

As she was checking me over I suddenly thought about Michael Moore’s ‘Sicko’ video it was the one where he ripped into the so-called American health system, it exposed the kind of system that the TPP treaty could lead us into by sheer accident because no body in their right mind could wish such a murderous scheme be introduced here in NZ.

And yet everything the Americans and their corporate controllers want Key seems keen to give them. [The same for Aussies or anyone really]

I mean we’ve got corporate education these days, Universities that are simply user-pays, where students are left with massive debt before they even start work. Polytechnics that can’t and won’t pay their staff proper wages because they have to spend education funding on advertising in opposition to and competing against Universities who waste education funding and student fees on sponsoring rugby teams…

We’ve even got primary, intermediate and secondary schools for profit starting up, all set up on the American for profit model…we call them ‘Charter Schools’.

Some of the America’s biggest health insurance companies are the biggest crooks at ripping off their members. They work their absolute guts out at finding ways not to pay out on claims.

America is supposedly the richest country in the world, yet it has the worse public health service in the world. It has over six to eight million people who have no health insurance as well as so called health insurance companies that simply rip off those who can afford to pay. May the Lord help us if we are forced down the same track as the US?

I know it sounds completely unbelievable but in America private hospitals run by so-called universities actually take patients who can’t afford to pay their medical bill, put them in a cab and take them to a street corner and dump them off.

In fact in real terms they murder them by neglect. But are they charged…hell no…that would be interfering with a private enterprise corporate run profit machine.  

And Key wants us to join up with this style public health system, Christ I wouldn’t wish it on my worse enemy, its bad enough that we destroyed our higher educational system by moving down the stupid and indefensible user pays route.

Types like Key [and Roger Douglas before him], have forgotten how we dragged him out of his state house, paid his wonderful Mum, gave him a free education at both primary and secondary levels and even footed the bill when he went to University…and his gift in return for those hundreds of thousands of dollars of hand-outs and ups is to pull the ladder up behind him and say hard luck… He did it, Paula Bennett did it, but that’s life…according to Steven Joyce, Judith Collins and those right-wing nutters who support the American dream here in Aotearoa New Zealand.        

If you get the chance to see or revisit Michael Moore and his absolutely magnificent video ‘Sicko’ please do so, show it to your friends, especially young people who may be having their first vote this year…give then a real taste of what life in America is ACTUALLY like, rather than the Hollywood version fed to them via TV and other corporate mass media outlets.