At first glance, the hardest change to make would seem to be removing the insurance industry from health care. The people who have been running that long con have been making a massive amount of money at it for a very long time. We are all in on it, too. Take a close look at your mutual fund, your 401(k), or your pension plan if anyone out there still has one. I imagine you will find that they are all heavily invested in health insurance.

So, the health insurance companies will not go quietly. Michael Moore in 2007 posted to his e-mail list a memo from an insurance company P.R. person, in which the main talking point was that the rising cost of health care should be attributed to bad lifestyle choices by the evil Baby Boomers. I cannot find the letter, but I can paraphrase him or her as saying that it took us 50 years to get into this mess and it will take us just as long to get out of it. Those figures rather closely match the lifespan of the Baby Boom.

The plan? Blame the Baby Boom for its own aging, sickness, and death, give them as little care as possible, and sit tight until they all die.

Anyone who spends a moment thinking of someone they love being spoken of or treated that way would rebel. It is not acceptible to us as human beings. We cannot blame people for illness and old age as some kind of personal failure. Human beings care for the sick and we honor the dead. From what I have read, that is one of the ways anthropologists have defined as human the beings they encounter. They look not only at whether the hominids bury their dead, but at whether there are signs of people having been cared for when ill or injured.

There was a wonderful example of this in the press a few years back, which I have not been able to find again. If my description rings a bell for anyone, please write in with a reference. An anthropological dig turned up a skeleton of a male hominid who died in his thirties, about when people died in those days if they lived a long life. The striking thing about him was that his skeleton showed signs of a seriously broken bone that had healed. The injury had happened some years before the person died. The researcher wrote that the fact that the bone had healed meant this person had been cared for over a long recovery. Others had brought him food, kept him warm, and looked after his needs. This was surprising to the researchers because this particular dig came from a time when they thought the hominids were living a harsh existence, and they had assumed that the sick would have been left to die. This forced the researchers to re-consider their evaluation as to whether these hominids should be called human or at least proto-human.

The point of this story is that it is part of being human to care for the sick. We cannot let that be taken away from us. Does anyone really want to live in a world where they will be blamed for partaking in the human condition?

It suits the insurance industry to have us see this as an all or nothing proposition: either we go along with their little horror story or the financial house will come tumbling down. But the insurance industry can change. That massive infrastructure could be turned to administering health care rather than denying it. It only takes the removal of the insurance model to unleash a massive supply of medical knowledge, human compassion, and resources. The people who work for those companies will still have plenty of work to do.

The only people who would be harmed by this would be the people who have so far been making money on the gamble. But they are going to start losing soon anyway. The scheme is not scalable, as they say in the business world. It is also not supportable, and when people see what is actually involved in the plan the P.R. flack laid out, they will not stomach it. We can either let the insurance industry take us all down with them, or we can, as gently as possible, inform them that they are going to have to find another way to make money. They can take care of themselves, in fact they have few other skills. We as a human society must start caring for our sick and dying again.