Transforming Health-care and Criminal Justice

By Jonathan Mark

Posted originally on June 12, 2009 at 911blogger.

Affordable universal health-care and more can be achieved by first recognizing the importance of a not-for-profit health-care system. This way we are all headed in the same direction, towards getting healthier. But granted, any new program at this critical juncture will require many dollars to work. However, the solution can get bigger than the problem when transforming multiple industries at once.

The U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations. In 2008 the International Herald Tribune documented that – “The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

The prison industry would be transformed by decriminalizing most drugs. Suddenly cost savings would be achieved by releasing nonviolent drug offenders from prison. To increase public employment and service, significant tax revenue could also be generated by the sale of substances now financing criminal enterprises. Taking out the profit-motive-intention in the medicine and prison industries would help lead to a leaner and more effective system. It would also lead to more effective programs for maintaining one’s health, and finding nonviolent solutions.

You may think the devils are in the details, but so are the solutions. If ever there was a good time for a big sweeping change in many industries at once, it is now. Yet it is unlikely that President Barack Obama (9/11 cover-up denier) will take on such industries for American people. Change is a political slogan; it is too threatening to some of the establishment that financed his campaign. But unless some better choices are acted upon soon, all our lives might get unduly shortened, and no one will benefit from such a decay of a system rotten to the core.

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Jonathan Mark, publisher of Flyby News, has been covering September 11 unanswered questions for the last eight years. He also posted two articles on 911blogger: Financial Crisis solution policy – Open letter to Obama – and The Old American Dream-hope Obama

Flyby News resource page:
Human Rights and A Nation
Behind Bars: the buried
talents of a population.