My obsession with government corruption comes from my aforementioned need to make logical sense of everything that I see. Here’s how I’d break down the current state of healthcare in the United States:

I see elected officials in a supposedly representative democracy who are not following the democratic will of the people, a large majority of whom agree with me in their desire to implement a single-payer system. I believe that a representative democracy is a great way to represent the will of the people in public policy, and when that does not happen, I get just a little bit frustrated. I essentially want all avenues of escape from performing this duty to be closed off by any legal means necessary. Campaign finance is the reason why single-payer, or even an opt-in public option, hasn’t already been signed into law. The most pragmatic way to eliminate the most amount of health-related suffering in this country is to ensure that the most amount of people have access to quality, affordable care. The way to do this is to look objectively at the rest of the modern first world and follow their examples of how to properly ensure the health of the citizenry.

I planned on updating my passion blog with the continued dichotomies of U.S. citizens and their European counterparts, but I find this to be too exhausting and not looking at the root of the problem. Focusing on the absurdity of campaign finance laws in this country allows me to further analyze many issues that are connected with legislation and its implementation (AKA everything important in this country).

I believe that a litmus test for both parties must be introduced by each party’s respective leadership. I believe that, in order to run for a Congressional seat, a candidate must first pledge his or her allegiance to fixing the healthcare system via a process that is logical, evidence-based, and responds to the will of the people. Although this is kind of like me having my cake and eating it too, I believe that this allows a lot of wiggle room for candidates to put forth their own ideas instead of just listening to some Penn State student’s blog. Of course, this cannot be drafted into law; the First Amendment protects politicians in their ability to assemble and speak of whatever policies they wish.

My two cents is that real, scientific, demonstrably-effective solutions to healthcare in American ought to be a must, a requirement from each major political party in this country. The good thing for party leadership is that these solutions are already empirically popular among the general U.S. voter population; so, withholding all of the “socialism” scare tactics of true opponents, these private, party requirements would do nothing but boost the overall political morale among the nation’s voters and give America a reason to get more people out to vote.

Why do 45,000 people die every single year because they don’t have access to basic healthcare?

In short, it’s because we do not live in a democracy. Studies coming out of Yale in the past two years have concluded that the will of the people has absolutely no correlation with the policy implemented by Congress; but the ultra-rich have an almost direct correlation between their desires and real-world action by the national legislature. I wonder why this is? Essentially, the people that run this country are allowed to take unlimited campaign contributions from individuals and corporations because of Corporate Person-hood upheld in Citizens United (2010). With this power, the influences of private healthcare companies, medical supply manufacturers, drug companies, and medical loan companies all pay their bribes to politicians for their absence of action and silence on the desperate issue of healthcare in this country.

My passion for changing the healthcare system in the United States stems from my passion for following the path of least intellectual resistance: I’m straightforward, logical, and anyone that disagrees with me NOT on the basis of logic or real scientific evidence is usually met with laughter and condemnation from me. This process would obviously be different if I were an actual elected official, but luckily, I’m an armchair politician and have no impact on legislation other than with my vote for the universally corrupted people in the first place.

It’s just…there’s absolutely no empirical evidence against the implementation of a single-payer, universal healthcare system. Every single nation that scores higher than the United States in healthcare coverage/quality is a nation with a  single-payer system, and all of which serve as examples to which we can compare our own way of doing things and make a change.

It genuinely frustrates me when people, who are otherwise educated in law and political science, demonstrate profound ignorance of the rest of the industrialized world and their almost lack of medical bankruptcies (the number one cause of bankruptcies in the U.S.) and people dying without access to affordable care. I am by no means a public servant nor am I in a field that comes close to that, but what I am sure of is by ability to read. Reading stories like the ones I’ve previously cited in my blogs, I get sick knowing that people in the country, the supposedly greatest country on Earth, don’t get that same level of basic treatment.

I don’t understand people actually thinking that you should suffer in a case where you don’t have the proper exorbitant sums to pay for medical treatment. So, the only option other than paying tens of thousands of dollars for a necessary procedure or course of treatment, is death.

Healthcare is a human right.