An effective, and to the point full-page ad is appearing in 10 Iowa papers today. The ad (.PDF), while advocating HR 676, the National Health Insurance Act, also points out an inconvenient truth: if Dick Cheney didn't have the government-financed health care he, Bush, and members of Congress enjoy, he'd most likely be dead by now.(I will make a slight correction to the ad: Cheney is rich, so he could probably afford health care. If Cheney were a middle-class American, on the other hand ...)
Take a look at his history as described in the PDF: four heart attacks, quadruple bypass surgery, angioplasty, an implanted defibrillator and an emergency procedure to treat an irregular heartbeat. Does anyone seriously believe a private insurer would have not either slammed him with impossible to pay rates, or dropped him altogether? Even in a system like Massachusetts', where insurance is mandated, most likely the rates would be impossible.
Let's not forget the United States is the only industrialized nation that does not have some form of universal health care, and that because of that we are near the bottom in terms of infant mortality (see link above).
Why should our government have free health care while the people they represent do not? Health care is not just for the rich, as most other nations know. Of course, health care giants and pharmaceutical companies don't want anything to change.
As Martin Luther King, Jr. once said,
Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.Do any of us deserve less than Cheney?
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