Which Side Are You On?...Day 19

I've always wondered why average, everyday people put bumperstickers on their cars that say "JAZZERCISE". What are we to make of that display of loyalty to the JAZZERCISE movement? The driver of the car is a JAZZERCISE instructor? JAZZERCISE saved this person's life by dancing them back from the brink of morbid obesity? This person invented JAZZERCISE? Are some people named JAZZERCISE? They just like bumper stickers, and any sticker will do?

My mind wanders sometimes when I'm behind the wheel. That's how I ended up in Otisco once, but that's another story. But what can make a person, an individual, identify so much with a product which they presumably don't produce or sell, and from which they derive no monetary benefit, that they would willingly place free advertising for that product on their car and drive around displaying it?

That's simply a minor observation of a harmless action. No one is diminished by someone else displaying a JAZZERCISE sticker on that someone else's car. Harmless. And thought provoking only to those with too much time on their hands due to auto confinement.

But another type of exo-indentification is showing itself now. And this product loyalty is dangerous and it is not confined to someone else's car bumper. I am speaking about the tendency, or at least the appearance of a tendency, of people to feel product loyalty to their health insurance seller. This loyalty manifests itself in the acceptance of the slanted view of health care put forth by this billion dollar industry.

The industry wants to stave off a public option because this option would be a highly competitive alternative to the system which renders billions of dollars of profit. The industry is essentially asking for protection from competition. The high level executives of these companies, I would bet, are many of the same ones who decry Unions for advocating protection against competition from slave labor in China. These guys will sing the loudest from the "Miraculous Market Hymnal" when such protection would ensure manufacturing jobs stay in this country rather than being exported to foreign lands. This outsourcing of labor cuts manufacturing costs and labor, but does not diminish profits to the corporation, quite the contrary.

Thousands of people die in this country because they either don't have health insurance, or the health insurance they do have is inadequate.People who buy into the protectionist corporate line are helping to prop up a system which denies a basic human right to their fellow citizens. They are buying into a lie which says the U.S. is the best (aren't we always?) in health care; we're actually ranked 37th in the world. They are buying into a lie which prevents reform, not because the proposed models don't work, they work in every other industrialized nation on Earth, but because, to ignore the lies will decrease the profits of health insurance companies. The health insurance industry does not make a product. It performs a service. And the service it provides is boosting profits to its shareholders and obscenely compensated executives through the denial of health coverage, and the skimming off of a little bit here, and a little bit there on each and every piece of paper they push through the labyrinthian maze.

Those who stand in the way of health reform, and work to maintain the system we have now are,in effect, sporting a bumper sticker that says, "PROFITIZE".


Here is a link to comprehensive exercise in myth busting. It is well worth your attention when conversing with someone on the other side of this issue.