If your neighborhood go-to guy for pharmaceuticals happens to be currently out of stock in the hallucinogenic department I can bail you out. Take up a brief history of the last couple of decades in American health care and fly, fly away.

Various presidents since Roosevelt have talked about or proposed some form of universal health insurance such as every other modern democracy on this our fair planet utilizes. America’s unique species of reactionary hydrocephalics arm-in-arm with corporate insurers in possession of rarefied treasure, brutish power and influence reliably managed to smother all the little babies in their cribs.

The national wave of agonized wailing from American voters at the wildly spurting costs and literally painful inefficiencies of American health crested in the early Nineties, thus provoking presidential candidate and eventual POTUS William Jefferson Clinton to pursue reform. Fortune 500 insurance companies and their Republican admirals summoned all hands on the propaganda deck. A spectacle featuring in its center ring the head of the Taskforce on National Health Care Reform Hillary Clinton transmogrified into a Santeria voodoo doll at the expense of the saliency of exigent health demands then ensued.

Republican elected leaders and conservative think tanks overheated machinery and exhausted their production lines manufacturing alternative proposals, each of them reliant upon the then valorous individual mandate which naturally is the centerpiece of Romneycare and the Affordable Care Act, and according to Republicans now, the deadliest threat to the perpetuation of the American Republic since Premier Khrushchev stashed his missiles in Cuba.

Reform defeated by the usual corporate greed-heads, Republican consligieres and feckless Democrats, Republicans brush all thought of health reform well out of their pretty little heads forever. Missing few beats, costs for care skyrocket, premiums go stratospheric, millions remain uninsured and die prematurely or end up in the emergency room in late stages of diseases and the system (everybody else) pays the tab. Hooray!

Eight years of the Republican Empire produce a landmark in Republican presidential and congressional negligence and malignant neglect on health…competence going comatose. Insurance companies fluff Republicans in the proper place. Costs for care skyrocket of course, premiums go stratospheric of course, millions remain uninsured and die prematurely of course or end up in the emergency room in late stages of diseases and the system (everybody else) pays the tab. Of course.

Obama the Pragmatist and Great Conciliator  arrives to save the day. Throwing the floor open to all ideas, Obama is told by Republicans to fuck himself, the latter interested only in his defeat in everything large and small. Insurance companies and private health providers remain engorged, and Republican campaign accounts  rosy. The administration and congressional Democrats manage to cobble together the Rube Goldberg health insurance apparatus that eliminates the most egregious indignities, absurdities and cruelties from the current system, but is messy, complicated, confusing, not entirely adequate, leaves the insurance companies sitting pretty naturally, and has the aesthetic appeal of George Constanza’s mother and Hazel combined.

In the wake of passage of the Affordable Care act red state elected officials, in a fever of ideological concupiscence maul the courts. The day arrives at last when the law goes before our glorious SCOTUS, far out-of-whack in its tilt right. Conservative jurists loudly anti-activist in yammer, but in practice historically activist in tossing precedents overboard conducts a hearing fit for a cable show. Only Anthony Kennedy’s general ideological ambivalence and unpredictability now stand between moderate sanity and continuation of the internationally embarrassing, incomparably expensive, messy and bureaucratic, literally sickening American health system.

Another bum trip, brought to you by: Masochists R Us.