Roll Over (Again) Adam Smith: The Hand Is Still Givin' Us The Finger!

Of all forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.
— Martin Luther King, Jr.

Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Medicine exist to serve the needs of the public. If you believe that chestnut, there is a huge bridge that connects Manhattan and Brooklyn that can be purchased with a small down-payment. Thanks to Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Medicine, the Land O'The Free and the Home O'The Brave, the United States

1. Has the most expensive health care system in the world.
2. Other than South Africa, is the only developed nation in the world that does not provide health care for all of its citizens.
3. Ranks 41^st in the world in infant mortality rates.
4. Ranks 46^th in the world for life expectancy.

Yada yada yada. Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Medicine will spend billions of dollars to defeat the current effort to bring about reform of our health care system. If this is (fair & balanced) injustice, so be it.

[x Wikipedia]
"The Invisible Hand"

The Invisible Hand is a metaphor coined by the economist Adam Smith (1723-1790). Once in The Wealth of Nations (1776) and other writings, Smith demonstrated that, in a free market, an individual pursuing his own self-interest tends to also promote the good of his community as a whole through a principle that he called “the invisible hand”. He argued that each individual maximizing revenue for himself maximizes the total revenue of society as a whole, as this is identical with the sum total of individual revenues.

[x Salon]
"This Modern World — Dr. Hand Explains Health Care & The Free Market"
By Tom Tomorrow (Dan Perkins)

Click on image to enlarge. Ω

Tom Tomorrow/Dan Perkins

[Dan Perkins is an editorial cartoonist better known by the pen name "Tom Tomorrow". His weekly comic strip, "This Modern World," which comments on current events from a strong liberal perspective, appears regularly in approximately 150 papers across the U.S., as well as on Salon and Working for Change. The strip debuted in 1990 in SF Weekly.

Perkins, a long time resident of Brooklyn, New York, currently lives in Connecticut. He received the Robert F. Kennedy Award for Excellence in Journalism in both 1998 and 2002.

When he is not working on projects related to his comic strip, Perkins writes a daily political weblog, also entitled "This Modern World," which he began in December 2001.]

Copyright © 2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves