Pollution and Disasters Break Every Argument Against Medicare for All
Just in case Democrats are looking for a way to win the midterms, here’s something they can use.
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I just read about yet another depressing pollution study. Thanks to forever chemicals like PFAS, rainwater isn’t safe to drink. I notice that the businesses that created those novel substances aren’t stepping up to pay for the health care costs resulting from exposure to those chemicals.
Better living through chemistry? This is a disaster. Here’s what Stockholm University had to say about the study:
“There has been an astounding decline in guideline values for PFAS in drinking water in the last 20 years. For example, the drinking water guideline value for one well known substance in the PFAS class, namely the cancer-causing perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), has declined by 37.5 million times in the U.S.” said Ian Cousins, the lead author of the study and professor at the Department of Environmental Science, Stockholm University.
In other words, the forever chemicals created by companies like 3M are so toxic, that since their toxicity was first recognized, we’ve had to reduce the guidelines of what we can safely ingest down to 1/37,500,000th of the original values. That is what they mean by a dramatic or astounding decline.
And that stuff is everywhere.
We can’t even trip and fall without fouling the environment. I woke up this morning thinking of all of our wondrous technology and I can’t think of a single groundbreaking technology that doesn’t foul the earth somehow. Everything that we have ever made has taxed the earth.
I’m playing that song, “Distant Early Warning” by Rush, in my head:
There’s no swimming in the heavy water
No singing in the acid rain
I’m thinking of one of the biggest polluters on earth, the US Department of Defense. We’re paying for this, right? God only knows what they’re spewing into the ecosphere right now.
If the American economy can absorb $800 billion a year for a horribly inefficient military-industrial complex, then it can absorb the cost of healthcare for everyone, regardless of political…
