heart ache

Just five days ago I was in the ER suffering a heart attack. Today I am back home feeling so much better. My family has no known history of heart trouble, my blood pressure is great and so are my cholesterol levels. I was a moderate to heavy smoker for about 30 years. I haven't had a cigarette since and I hope to never smoke one again.

A friend of mine brought me an interesting book, The Easy Way To Quit Smoking, by Allen Carr. As I read, I wondered how this could apply to other areas and reflected how the book paralleled Buddhist right view or proper perspective. I now see that it has been applied to alcohol and weight loss, but I would of course, like to apply it to the Big Problem. Carr explains how amazing it is that, "the fear of the horrendous health risks attached to smoking is overshadowed by the fear of stopping. It's not so much that the latter fear is greater, but that if we quit today the fear is immediate, whereas the fear of contracting lung cancer is a fear of the future".

So there it is. We are poised on the brink of Collapse that will bring unimaginable suffering to billions of humans because we fear that we may have to make a little sacrifice today. The greed of a few psychopaths and sociopaths threaten to bring ruin to us all. Too bad there isn't a test to see who they are...as if we need a test. Consider that one of CEOs of United Healthcare received 1.7 billion dollars in compensation and then another also received more than one billion dollars in compensation. Don't you think that it would require a psycho to skim off all that cash that could be used for health care? Who really needs a billion dollars?

James Verone tried to rob a bank for a dollar so that he could be sent to prison and receive the health care that he desperately needs. Unfortuantely, one dollar wasn't enough so he won't be going to prison. I sympathize with the man, after all, I had several small heart attacks before I went to the hospital. I don't have any health insurance, I'm having trouble paying my rent and I wasn't sure whether it was my heart or lung cancer. I do know that I had plenty of fantasies of hunting and terrorizing those who are responsible for preventing this country from having universal health care like all of the other developed nations.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

There are about 50 million people without any healthcare, 45 million using medicare and 58 million using medicaid. If we do the math and add those numbers we find that about half of Americans are privately insured and the rest rely on the government or nothing at all. The wealthiest 400 families in the US have as much or more wealth than all of the uninsured and government insured people combined. They're all billionaires. Does anyone really need a billion dollars? Is it moral?