Dana Blankenhorn

No Such Thing as Health Insurance

Politics, theology and economics agree.

There is no such thing as health insurance.

There is care. There is non-care.

But insurance is a bet against odds. You bet with the car insurance company you’ll get into an accident. You bet with the life insurance company you’ll die.

This is not true with “health insurance.” The need for care is a certainty. The need varies by age, by circumstance, and by chance. But everyone needs regular, preventive medical care. Nearly everyone needs some type of medication to deal with mild symptoms like headache and stomach upset. Nearly every woman of child-bearing years needs birth control. Nearly every kid falls or gets sick more than once a year.

Timing a Turn Toward Truth

Three weeks ago, I suggested it was time Google took responsibility for the news business, paying for links through a journalistic process that would turn the industry away from fake news, clickbait, and paywalls.

Like most of what I write, the piece was ignored. But the “newspaper industry” did make what it thinks is a move in the right direction, asking for permission to bargain as a group with Google and Facebook, unionizing so it could demand cash from the industry’s bosses. 

Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. The papers don’t get to define what they write as true and take someone else’s money for it. As every working journalist knows, our industry follows the Golden Rule. He who has the gold makes the rules. The papers’ suit shows they know Google has the gold. Thus, Google should make the rules.

Amazon.Com vs. Trumpistan

Given that this past week was Prime Day, it’s worth noting that if there is one company to blame for the troubles of Trumpistan, it’s Amazon.Com.

Amazon is behind all the trends that are destroying the lives of Trumpistanis, before their very eyes.

The Amazon cloud, sold as Amazon Web Services, powered the app trend that destroyed the jobs of suburban gatekeepers, the insurance agents and real estate agents, the travel agents and editors who are now apps. This took the leadership out of many suburbs, as effectively as a decapitation.

Amazon’s store, and its marketplace, have since destroyed retailing. This was another big source of suburban jobs.

The Jim Crow Project

In my studies of history here over the last decade I have learned that every crisis is based on the unfinished business of previous crises.

We are taught in school how the Civil War was made inevitable by the compromises of the Constitution. But the Civil War is still being fought. It can still be lost.

Right now, it is being lost.

Jim Crow replaced slavery as the guiding rule of the South after northern troops left in 1877. The chain gang kept black men from building lives for their families. Poll taxes and tests kept them from voting. The KKK killed anyone who disagreed with the new order from raising their voice, on pain of death. Segregation kept the races from achieving any understanding, other than that of master and servant.