It is the year 2021 and America is number one in the world. It is number one in the world in terms of death. More people have been killed by the Coronavirus in America than in any other country. Now this is a really impressive achievement in terms of government incompetence and iresponsibility. Think about this. The death rate in America is almost 10 times that of India, a rather poor country. 500,000 Americans have been killed. That's a larger figure in one year than the death toll in America for all four years of World War II.
500,000 DEATHS - THIS IS NOT AN ACCIDENT
Now you can say many things about this this disaster but one thing you cannot say is that it is an accident. It is a very logical result of evil and stupid healthcare policies in the United States of America. America is truly exceptional when it comes to healthcare. It is an exceptional moral and practical disaster. Every other modern state considers healthcare to be a right. It is a principle of morality of how people treat each other. It is also a principal of national security and national survival. Most nations have free healthcare services because they don't want disease spreading through their society. That's the same reason why they have paid sick leave policies. You don't want disease spreading through your society. Again America is exceptional . It is one of the few nations in the world that does not have a paid sick leave policy. In other words, when a person gets infected by a contagious disease in America they are under strong economic pressure to show up for work and spread the disease throughout all their coworkers. Most people consider this immoral. Most people consider this incredibly stupid but that is what America is doing.
SCIENTISTS HAVE BEEN PREDICTING A PANDEMIC FOR YEARS
THE POLITICIANS HAVE IGNORED THE SCIENCE
Now every expert in the world has predicted the coming of an epidemic such as Covid. So it's not like this is something that nobody knew about. This was actively predicted by all scientists. It has also been totally predicted that if a country does not have national health insurance, an epidemic is going to be a particularly serious disaster. That's reality. These are known facts. So what happened in America in 2020 and 2021 was a totally predictable disaster. The ruling elite in America ignored reality. They ignored every scientist in the world that warned them about this.
THE ECONOMIC FALLOUT OF COVID
We need to give credit where credit is due because the ruling elite here not only got 500,000 of their fellow citizens killed. They also created a economic catastrophe of truly mind-boggling dimensions where millions of people have had their lives wrecked by the shutdowns that came as a result of the epidemic. Now we're not going to get into the debate among experts about the scale of the shutdowns and what should've been and what should not have been shut down. Suffice it to say that had the country been organized the way it should have been, it would have been able to deal with the virus before it got to the scale that it developed in this country. That is a fact.
THE DECLINE OF GOVERNMENT EXCELLENCE AFTER REAGAN
Now we also need to come up with a another factor that caused this, which is a state of what you can only describe as political insanity in America. Government excellence matters. It matters to have really good intelligent professional people running environmental agencies, running healthcare agencies. Unfortunately, since the time of Ronald Reagan, there's been an attitude that government is some sort of problem, and if we just got government out of the way we would have some kind of utopia. And in 2021 we got government out of the way. We got government out of the way of the coronavirus and 500,000 people got killed and the economy for middle-class America was completely nearly destroyed. So we did get it out of the way and there's a direct result of a lack of respect for government excellence. It's a direct result of a lack of respect for public service that we got into this mess. Mr. Trump appointed a guy called Redfield as head of the CDC. Mr. Redfield is a not very competent right wing political ideologue who has had some rather questionable business activities in his past. He was appointed to run a vital agency instead of a healthcare profession. Meanwhile, neoconservative Mr. Bolton, who Mr. Trump appointed as his chief national security advisor, abolished the epidemic monitoring task force that had been set up by Former President Obama. So again there is not a mystery about what happened. What happened was a very logical result of government policies.
WHAT IS THE SOLUTION DURING A HEALTH CARE CRISIS?
PROVIDE HEALTH CARE FOR ALL
So what to do what to do? We feel the following solution needs to be taken seriously. We need to treat one of the greatest crises in American history as a crisis. Now, if you have a healthcare crisis, it seems to us logical that you would produce like every other modern country in the world does which is to provide healthcare services as a right. Yes, you should not have to have a $7000 deductible. You should not be banned from buying health insurance other than the certain period of time in terms of so-called open enrollment, an act of total insanity by our government. Everyone should get healthcare as a right, as they do in every modern state. National paid sick leave should be implemented as is in every other modern state. In other words, America needs to get connected to the real world. Healthcare needs to be a right. We cannot have a system where you are denied healthcare because you didn't make enough money speculating on Wall Street. It needs to be a simple. Not spending hours on the phone figuring out which exchange can help you. We should look at the analogy of fire service, which at least America does have. People get fire service. You don't go through 45 different bureaucratic hoops if your house is on fire. You call the fire department and they come. That's why we have government . So we need to get back to reality and we need to give people healthcare as a right. The disastrous state of the American healthcare system is a direct cause of the current catastrophe.The American people as a whole are in very poor health and one of the reasons their in very poor health is because the lack of social justice in America. That's a simple fact. We can't get into in this lecture dealing with the whole social justice disaster in this country that would be a 400 hour lecture. We just got to deal with one thing here, which is healthcare.
HEALTH CARE IS NATIONAL SECURITY
We also need to make one more point, which is the concept of national security. The Nazis and the Japanese killed 400,000 Americans in four years. Government incompetence and immorality just killed 500,000 Americans in one year. So what is our concept of national security? America is spending more than the next seven nations combined on war and military spending. Does this make sense? We think there are some serious questions about this. Is America morally fit to be intervening around the world on the grounds that it is an exporter of human rights? There is a human rights crisis now in America and there has been for a long time. When 500,000 of your own citizens get killed because you don't want to provide them health insurance that's a human rights catastrophe. That's a moral and ethical catastrophe.
CONCLUSION
So 2021 is a moment of truth. The American people need healthcare. The American government needs to provide the American people with healthcare as a right as every modern state does. The American government needs to provide national paid sick leave to the American people, as every modern state does. It is interesting to think that Kaiser Wilhelm in Germany over 100 years ago was willing to give his subjects national health insurance. One hundred years later the American government today in the 21st century can't do the same? Teddy Roosevelt over 100 years ago called for national health insurance and the American government can't do the same? We are in the middle of one of the biggest if not the biggest internal crisis in the history of the country. So to the politicians we say reform is coming, whether you like it or not. It's either going to come from an upheaval or you can finally bite the bullet and do what you need to do. Those who oppose reform, those who don't want to give us healthcare, we have a message for you. Is killing 500,000 Americans not enough? How many people should die before you give us reform? Maybe 600,000? Maybe a million? Please give us a figure because we have to say enough is enough. The time for healthcare reform is now. 2021 is the year when the American people should get the same kind of healthcare healthcare as a right as every modern state.