It goes deeper than the insurance companies.

Multi-national corporations have us in a stranglehold we're not going to get out of until we elect a congress the members of which haven't been there long enough to have been bought.

Remember the days of four commercials an hour. Remember when baseball games started at 7:00 o'clock instead of today's 7:07 because someone's algorithms indicated that was the way to have breaks in the ballgame coincide with commercials on other stations.

Remember that before the inflation the 1970's oil increases caused, bribes offered to politicians were in amounts of thousands of dollars.

Many were not tempted by a few thousand, and some not even by a few hundred thousand, but inflation in the 70's changed all of that.

Any bribe less than a million dollars is considered bush league. Someone who turned a jaundiced eye at the old bribe offer of, say, ten thousand dollars, gives immediate attention to one of a million or more today.

Factoring in the rate of inflation, lobbyists get more today for less real dollars than they did before the oil price increases of 1972-3.

Control of congress, plus the elimination of 12% interest usury laws which paved the way for credit card interest rates of 30% or more, clearly justified turning over the control of oil pricing by apparently prescient big oil company barons to a previously docile Arab organization called OPEC.

I appear to digress, but prior to the post 1970's surge in corporate muscle and influence in congress, healthcare was, for the most part, a non-profit endeavor.