Healthcare Reform

Crisis has finally provoked government intervention into the financial industry. The phenomenon of crisis, like in the Great Depression, has traditionally been the rallying call for governmental social reform.

 

By raising profits for investors, free market healthcare routinely raises costs for already struggling families. Traditional methods of nationalizing health care like protests, letters, and bills, rely on the misguided assumption that government is concerned with other people who don't have golden toilets and flying cars. The current economic predicament illustrates that government attention is earned by crisis in the economic supports of the American structure. 

 

To accomplish their goals, health care advocates' methods must change. Rather than relying on reason and persuasion, they must create an unignorable crisis that rattles the foundations of society.  I recall films such as *28 Weeks Later* and *Night of the Living Dead,* in which a virus threatens to tear society limb from limb until the government intervenes.  Similar to these films, I propose a mass infection of the United States' citizenry, in order to nationalize the health care system.

 

The infection must be able to spread itself, thus a treatable quasi-zombie virus is ideal.  Initially, there would be a need to infect many people, but the virus would eventually become autonomous.

 

A mass infection would produce horrific images and an undeniable urgency to stop the epidemic. Images of people running through the street, brain lumps smattering their chins, gnawing on neighbors knuckles—pandemonium, whole subway cars leaking blood, and mountains of pustuous, fetid corpses cluttering up the streets.

 

The cure would be readily available at all hospitals, provided one can juke through the throngs of malodorous undead. Citizens would rush to their hospitals demanding the remedy. While still thoroughly brain damaged, the cured would no longer crave cranial lobes. They would then demand money for those services from insurance agencies. The volume of requests would force insurance barons to turn to their government for support whom would then buy them out.

 

I assure you that I have no ulterior motive but that of the common good. It is undeniable that nationalizing health care, unifying the country through crisis, rewarding the rich with our tax dollars for their inability to handle this catastrophe, and zombifying the general public,  is good for each and every one of us.