Death is the source of new wealth and is scattered throughout Republican policy. It can be gauged by gathering statistics. Of the scattered statistics, the administration never mentions deaths from opiate addiction. In 2015, 52,404 persons died from overdoses of prescription or street drugs. 20,101 of these deaths were from prescription overdoses! Three years earlier, in 2012, 259 million scripts were written by doctors for opiates! (All explicit acts by doctors, insurance, and pharmaceutical companies in the free market we are told to trust with healthcare.)
The average death rate of 1,000 people a week exceeds the threat from terrorism! Yet there is no call to suspend opiate prescriptions for 90 days (there are alternatives!) until a review and an improved policy can be put in place. These deaths do not excite fear, only grief. But in 90 days, fear or not, 13,000 people will die.
Death is adding to America’s golden pockets.
In agriculture, industry, or policy, wealth creates waste: its excesses include grain shortages, abandoned plants, and broken neighborhoods littered with the dead. The Greater Ville community in St Louis, MO has a murder rate three times the the country which is world’s capital of homicide, Honduras; Greater Ville, 290.8 per 100k population, Honduras, 90.4 per 100k. (The US: 4.9 per 100K! The Greater Ville rate is 58 times higher than the country as a whole!). Ninety percent of women killed in the industrialized world lived in the US.
The main Republican policy of death is their competing healthcare plans. After 7 years of nothing, their rush to politics has created bills to deny coverage (by caps, higher premiums, and more restrictions for preconditions) to some 24 million people in order to provide 765 billion in tax breaks for folk earning over a million dollars a year.
Although death is the new public wealth privatized. the Senate bill is being written in secret. Why is it being written in secret if it is such a good bill? The President says it is, but he hasn’t read it. Neither have representatives of doctors, nurses, hospitals and other care facilities, neither have addiction specialists, pediatricians, oncologists, or specialists in preventative medicine or hospice–or consumers! Why is the work of democracy being done it secret?
The economy is expanding and healthcare is a key benefit that impacts labor and mobility to make the economy more efficient. Why is the nation’s most important legislation–Buffett says more important than tax policy–being written in secret? Are women present? Blacks? Latinos? Or is the Senate exercising white male privilege?
Politics should not be a private brand. Public death should not become a source of private wealth. But it has: death is an asset on wealthy balance sheets! In policy, death scatters its statistics, in deadly civility, and hides its results. But in this America, it puts bunce at the top!
The Senate has gone into hiding. What does it say when the world’s most important deliberative legislative body establishes a secret cabal accountable only to the leaders of a single party? Especially when the surrounding talk openly describes the dark secret of this “replacement” bill: it will not benefit the poor, the elderly, or middle class working families with better prices or better coverage, but only add major bunce for the rich. How? In exchange for $765 billion in tax relief for the rich, 3 million Americans will die.
Unnamed graveyard, 1936. Walker Evans photo.
