In Dubya's State of the Union address, he attempted to deflect attention from other issues with a new pledge to expand health care coverage without raising taxes.

Dubya wants to give an income tax break to low-income people for buying private health insecurance, while cutting back on benefits for workers with relatively "good" polities.

It would be amazing if a vast majority of those of us who are left out of health care coverage in this country didn't have incomes that are so low that income tax breaks are meaningless for those most affected. It's like the income tax breaks before 9/11, where I (with an approximately median income) got a check for a $200 refund while some super-rich people were getting deductions worth more than most Americans earn in a lifetime of employment.

Dubya's proposal doesn't do anything for the poorest people, who need health care coverage the most. A lot of the clients at the U-District Food Bank don't have enough income to pay taxes on, so how the hell is an income tax break gonna help them get access to health care?

The relative winners would seem to be the insecurance companies and some of the working poor, who could be getting slightly less expensive private health care insurance. That, in turn is a hidden benefit to America's most exploitive employers, who want to maximize profits by minimizing employment benefits to become more like Third World countries than like Americans who are union members.

The class warfare thing has been politically-incorrect with corporate media for so long that it's easy to forget that the Bush regime is the poster child for a government that's there to look out for the wealthiest interests to the disadvantage of everyone else (and the health of the planet). For sure, Dubya's proposal won't solve the problem of inequality in access to health care based on wealth any better than sending more troops to Iraq will solve the problem of the Iraqi people wanting American soldiers out of their country.

It's in considerable contrast to a paradigm shift towards having a health care system where health care is perceived as a fundamental human right that is paid for through the income tax system. Everyone would pay for a health care system designed to operate at minimal public expense by promoting good health and by actively protecting the public against polluters and interests that sell unhealthy food or lifestyles.

Governments would be a whole lot better if they behaved less like corporations looking after the short-sighted, selfish interests of wealthy investors rather than protecting people and the planet against such interests. The United States of America has a health care system that is the world's most expensive and profitable at the same time as being stupendously inefficient and socially inequitable.

The health care system in the United States has an investor-driven basis that puts more value on hiring insurance salesmen and private insurance administrators than minimizing costs for users (or investing in more nurses or environmental protection instead). In the rest of the industrialized world, health care is less expensive and more widely available than in the United States, because access to health care is perceived as a human right. Having lived in Canada for many years, I appreciate living somewhere that the public doesn't pay the hidden costs of advertising for pharmaceuticals on mass media, and where local citizens fear politicians who want to destroy Canada's health care system on behalf of multinational pharmaceutical interests that get tax breaks for political contributions.

Certainly there would be a massive disruption of employment in a paradigm shift to a new American health care system intended to minimize public costs rather than maximizing private profit. The existing for-profit private health care system employs a lot of people who would lose their jobs, just as people in the stable and carriage industries lost jobs when automobiles took over from horses. Many of the people who do administrivia for private insecurance companies would be a needed source of manpower for a new health care bureaucracy (if their jobs haven't been outsourced to India already), and perhaps some of the salespeople could be retrained to enforce environmental regulations for the EPA or get wealthy tax cheats to pay their taxes for the IRS.