Our health care system is based on the premise that health care is a commodity like VCRs or computers and that it should be distributed according to the ability to pay in the same way that consumer goods are. That's not what health care should be. Health care is a need; it's not a commodity, and it should be distributed according to need. If you're very sick, you should have a lot of it. If you're not sick, you shouldn't have a lot of it. But this should be seen as a personal, individual need, not as a commodity to be distributed like other marketplace commodities. That is a fundamental mistake in the way this country, and only this country, looks at health care. And that market ideology is what has made the health care system so dreadful, so bad at what it does.

Marcia Angell, M.D. and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine and my new unsung super hero! This is from an interview with PBS.

Not only are we struggling with an incurable disease, we are players in the middle of a money making system that benefits from keeping us unwell. We are merely grist for the mill.

-Laura