N a p a l m H e a l t h S p a : R e p o r t 2 0 1 2

ELIOT KATZ

Dear President Obama, Congress, and the Mainstream Media:

Give Us Single-Payer Health Care

The health insurance companies are a cancer.

Remove them from the picture & the national stress

level will go down 43%. Clogged arteries will begin

to race. Dirty lungs will shower and take

a deep breath. Incurable liver-cancer cure rates

will rise 32.92%. This damn back pain I feel

when walking was caused by Oxford hiring

Triad, Inc. as gatekeeper to avoid paying

chiropractic bills. My post-surgery knee pain lasted

months longer than needed because insurance only

paid for cheapest physical therapy center in town.

It would take a 300-page book, which I'm going to write

one day, to tell my horror stories of trying

to get diagnosed & treated for the fatigue, chills,

and spreading joint pains of Lyme disease under

the watchful, half-closed eyes of the insureaucrats.

My file cabinet has announced its refusal to hold any more

envelopes filled with HIP's contradictory paperwork

instructions. These private health insurance companies

are the reason high school reading comprehension rates

are down all across America. Break the insurance companies

of their habits and their holds and there will be no more

reason for economic bubbles or preemptive wars. I know that,

for an elected official, it must be emotionally exhausting

to weigh the competing interests of the impatient patients

and the dozing lobbyists whose concrete boots are

ever-planted in Congress's roving halls. I know

that, for a mainstream reporter to tell the tale of a simple,

effective, and morally just solution to our health care crisis

goes against the grain of everything taught in our nation's

most expensively decorated journalism schools. But try

to follow the mind's math. Poetry statistics hardly ever lie.