Dire Straits chicken plucks and powers through Setting Me Up, a Mark Knopfler tune on their first record . The chorus goes:

"You're setting me up to put me down, You're making me out to be your clown,
You're just setting me up to put me down, You better give it up, Quit your messing around."

The lunacy of politics and the failure we all share in not resolving the key problems our country faces reminded me of this song. After thirty years our government still teases us that actual governing and problem solving takes place as the country merges into giant cartels smothering all industries while reducing choice and competition. Promising ideas still float to government officials after all these years, but meet the same fly swatter by corporate lobbyists who now write laws of their own choosing while reducing the influence of the electorate to zero.

CBS and Business Week reports that the pharmaceutical industry spends over $57 billion dollars a year directly on doctors for fees and services in this country to push their drug agenda. This dollar figure does not include the promotional prescriptions, pens and other office adornments found at all clinics throughout our land, or what this industry spends on advertising. This spend is actually higher than what drug companies lay out everyday to catch your attention on tv, radio and print. 

Maybe $57 billion seems like a small sum to you these days given our trillion dollar debt that nobody understands, or the more than $2 trillion we spend on our health industry. It represents approximately all of Bill Gates fortune. The entire pet industry in America totals a little more than $42 billion annually . These fees and services to doctors represents more than 35% of all the money Americans spend each year on all their animals. This yearly doctor payout by  the pharmaceuticals is five times more  than all the money the music industry makes in a year here in America.

Families USA had a report three years ago on how many non-elderly Americans were without health insurance during 2002-2003. Here's the quote:

"One out of three non-elderly Americans spend some time without health insurance every two years, and the majority of those remain uninsured for more than nine months."

Some people are fine with this situation, until it affects their personal space. The dialog about necessary changes to the way we conduct health business has been going on since Nixon was in office. You do know who has profited by the few changes that have taken place and the derailment of other changes proposed, don't you?

Here is a link to a proposal for universal health care coverage.  Many really bright individuals have about given up even trying to address extremely important issues today given the toxic partisan political climate. Health care should not be about candidate fund raising, political ideology and excessive profit. Certainly not when a third of our population can go  without health insurance for  extended periods of time. 

Really, it is time all Americans were covered.