Uninsured America

Uninsured America

Courtesy of New York Times

The above image comes from a New York Times article analyzing the number of people in each county in the United States who lack health insurance. Before the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) was rolled out in 2013, nearly the entire map was dark blue because nearly 20% of all Americans lacked any kind of health insurance. Today, thanks to Obamacare, millions of Americans who did not have health insurance in 2013 now have health insurance. However, millions more are still lacking health insurance, and if you look at the map you will notice a pattern of where those uninsured people are living.

The Americans who are uninsured now, at the end of 2015, mostly live in the South and the Southwest, in poorer than average counties, in Republican-leaning states. This is because, for some reason, Republicans and Democrats have decided that whether or not poor Americans deserve to live when they are sick or injured should be a political wedge issue.

Of course, neither the Republican nor Democratic lawmakers have strong opinions one way or the other about whether regular Americans should have health insurance. They all have health insurance for themselves and their families thanks to their cushy government positions and the vast majority of them are wealthy enough that paying for it wouldn’t be an issue for them even if they weren’t working in the government. Moreover, the people who fund their campaigns, the Wall Street bankers and the industry lobbyists, don’t care what happens as long as it doesn’t cost them any money.

Instead, what has happened is that both sides have realized that people who tend to vote Democrat value fair access to the basic necessities of life, like health care, while people who tend to vote Republican get riled up and ready to vote when they are told that freeloaders want to steal their tax dollars and get something for nothing. As a result, the Democrats talk about how they want to make sure that all Americans have access to health care, and pass laws in a few Democratic states to make it easier for the poor to buy insurance. Republicans talk about how Obama is going to kill everyone with socialist medicine, and the poor in Republican states continue to be uninsured, and die needlessly.

To the Republicans and Democrats in Congress, politics is a game, and Americans’ health is just another pawn to move around the board. They don’t care about the real world results of their political maneuvering; they only care about getting reelected so they can keep sucking down all that great lobbyist money and keep making their friends on Wall Street happy.

Our political system is thoroughly broken. Americans’ lives are not something that can be bought and sold for political points. The Democratic and Republican parties are just two sides of the same corporate coin, and cannot be trusted to keep the interests of regular Americans in mind. We need to abandon this Demo-Republican system and elect representatives who will focus on what needs to be done instead of what will increase Wall Street profits by another 0.5%.

That’s why I’m running for president as an independent in 2016. One of my top priorities will be to overturn the broken Obamacare legislation and introduce a new health care bill that will provide Americans across the country with health coverage. No citizen of the richest country in the world should ever go bankrupt or die needlessly because they cannot afford their health care. Together, we can fix this. I urge you to forget about the liars in the Democratic and Republican parties and cast your write-in vote for me, Art Drew, for President of the United States.