Jitterbugging for Jesus

For all the hype about the booming American economy, it remains an economy of “exclusion and inequality.”

It’s also an economy that continues to kill.

According to a new study, nearly 45,000 deaths a year are associated with lack of health insurance.

That number is about 21/2 times higher than an estimate from the Institute of Medicine back in 2002.

Go here to read the study’s astounding findings, conducted at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance, for yourself.

In recent weeks, groups of desperate American diabetes patients have organized caravans to Canada to buy insulin in bulk at a fraction of what they have to pay in the U.S.

There have also been many reports nationwide of all kinds of people with chronic illnesses (“preexisting conditions”) rationing their medicines.

Obviously, an insulin shot or blood-pressure pill is not something you want to skimp on. But people are skimping because of an economic system so rotten that, as the pope so boldly asserted, it kills.

Somehow this healthcare crisis, the result of a broken capitalist system that allows drug companies to gouge us all, is still not treated like a national emergency.

Our political leaders on the so-called Left and Right have all the answers, all the quick fixes. But politicians of all stripes have been forever promising quick and easy fixes in a capitalist system that left behind fairness and equitable treatment a long time ago.

At the present time, the cost of those quick fixes promised by leaders and candidates on the Left would cost money that America, which has been bankrupt for years, cannot possibly afford.

Even former President Obama, of all people, recently admonished Democratic candidates running for president to get real about the lack of money for so many Grand Plans providing so-called “free” services.

All these grand Grand Plans and promises, Obama pointed out, would be good if we were starting with a balanced budget and not at $22 trillion in the hole. (And projections of a possible $28 trillion debt ahead.)

That said, leaders on the Right don’t seem to care about healthcare and drug-price fixes at all. The last time the clueless Donald J. Trump addressed healthcare costs, he — who feels our pain — promised that he would unveil “a beautiful healthcare plan you’re going to love” — as soon as he is reelected in November 2020.

So no need to worry: he has this secret plan for a healthcare fix not unlike the secret plan he had to win the war in Afghanistan in 30 days upon taking office.

Meanwhile, Americans are suffering because of lack of health insurance and because the price of pharmaceuticals has been skyrocketing for seven.long.straight.years.

This booming, go-go economy with all this low unemployment shows no sign of slowing down, but you don’t have to be a pollster to know that our collective anxieties and economic fears keep running higher.

Maybe because we all know, those of us who’ve had much life experience, that every go-go economic boom is followed by a hellacious economic bust.

Maybe also because we see all those homeless people in the streets, so many of whom had it made in other boom times.

I believe in capitalism and I’m all for it, having reaped the benefits of it my whole life. But here’s the hitch — I’m for capitalism that is fair, and equitable, and ethical, and steered in the direction of the common good.

Capitalism in the 21rst century is none of the above.

Capitalism in the 21rst century, as the pope so boldly asserted is a killer