My mom has been waiting at the emergency department for almost 12 hours now. Severe abdominal pain, uncontrolled vomiting. She's in the waiting room because there are no beds, no rooms. The waiting room is so crowded her friend had to go wait in the car.
When I was a kid NBC Nightly News used to run stories about the awful conditions in Soviet countries. Waiting in lines for toilet paper. Unexplained shortages in stores. Inability to get medications. Overcrowded emergency rooms.
The point was that the U.S. was better, that capitalism was better than communism, because we didn't have those conditions.
I think the upshot is that any country whose governance is trying to steal as much as possible from people and give it to massive corporations, criminals, and billionaires is going to produce conditions of overworked scarcity for the 99% of us who are not billionaires and corporate shills.
And, meanwhile, my 75 year old mother is sitting in an overcrowded waiting room, trying to get a CT scan to see if there is something terribly wrong.
I am not sure where we start in order to replace this with something that doesn't harm people. But I'm going to try everything I can think of.
Sigrid Ellis
Jennifer Slack