Hardly a week passes without a negative Obamacare headline staring at me from the New York Times. The Affordable Care Act, also known as “Obamacare” was passed with great fanfare in March 2010 and was variously labeled as “the greatest advance in healthcare since Medicare and Medicaid” and as the “the most positive thing that this country has done since the civil rights legislation that was passed back in the ’60s.”

The Republican House has voted dozens of times to repeal Obamacare without ever offering a viable alternative. However, it certainly appears that the Affordable Care Act is dying a slow death all by itself without Republican assistance. Look at a few headlines from the last couple of years:

Big Changes in Fine Print of Some 2015 Health Plans

Seeking Rate Increases, Insurers Use Guesswork

Data Shows Large Rise in List Prices at Hospitals

Double Digit Rate Hikes Loom for Obamacare 2016

Sorry, We Don’t Take Obamacare

Think Your Obamacare Plan Will Be Like Employer Coverage? Think Again

Health Insurers Use Process Intended to Curb Rate Increases to Justify Them

Aetna will leave most Obamacare exchanges, projecting losses

Health-care exchange sign-ups fall far short of forecasts

Obamacare Marketplaces Are in Trouble. What Can Be Done?

These news headlines illustrate exactly why I think that the Affordable Care Act cannot continue to exist in its present state: a medical care system intended to ultimately cover everyone and reduce medical costs while relying on corporations whose sole reason for existence is profit.

Michael Moore’s brilliant and prescient film “Sicko”, released almost 10 years ago, made this abundantly clear (by the way, while he is dismissed as a kook by the right, Mr. Moore to me is a sage, prophet and patriot). “Sicko” pointed out that anything less than a single payer program, like “Medicare for all”, any program involving corporations and profit contains the seeds of its own destruction. The medical insurance companies must show a profit and must, like all capitalist enterprises, increase profit and grow. Stasis and balance are not part of the capitalist system. And how does a health insurance company grow and increase profit? By gaining more customers, paying less in benefits or charging more for premiums, a recipe for the failure of any corporate-run effort toward providing universal coverage.

Health care is a public issue and should be a public service like education, highways, water, and electrical service. It should not be viewed as a commodity to be bought and sold. One should not have to buy a health insurance “policy”, as if buying car insurance. Access to affordable healthcare should be a right and should be enshrined among all of our other rights, as it is in European countries. It is interesting to glance back at the “Second Bill of Rights”, proposed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1945 and which surely would have been enshrined in the constitution had he lived. One of the articles in this wonderful document is: “The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health”.

It might be useful to consider what health insurance companies do to earn their massive revenue and profits. Well they do essentially what the state bureaucracies operating the Canadian National Health program or the British National Health Service do. They take money from government or private sources and, based on the nature and level of service provided, pass it along to doctors, hospitals and drug distributors. Not very complicated is it? In countries with national health systems, this process is conducted very efficiently and economically. In the US, with United Healthcare, Cigna, Humana, Aetna and a host of other companies performing this simple function, it becomes very expensive because these companies have to make a profit to pay shareholders and to pay their CEOs’ multi-million dollar salaries. Something is indeed wrong with this picture.

So what do you suppose happens at Board meetings or at high level executive meetings in these companies? How do the highly paid “big guns” of United Healthcare or Humana or Aetna sit around their big shiny tables and brainstorm corporate strategy or new products or new markets for future growth? Well, considering what they actually do, they’re embarrassingly limited. A “new product” has to be a new “policy” which provides less service to the consumer or less compensation to the doctor or hospital. A new growth strategy is “how do we get more people or companies to sign up and buy our “product” or “how can we discourage the sick and chronically ill from signing up and encourage more young and healthy people to sign up? Or maybe the best and most simple strategy of all – let’s raise the prices of the health insurance policies we sell. Or better yet, let’s disguise an increase by having the consumer pay a higher deductible and keep the price the same. Or, let’s make the language describing the benefits we provide really confusing and deceptive, surreptitiously raising the deductible or the copay. Or, best of all, since we’re an integral part of Obamacare, how can we squeeze the government for more customers, for bigger subsidies, more money so we can increase profit? These are corporate strategies like none other – no investment in research, invention, engineering, design improvement, raw materials selection, creativity or test marketing. These healthcare corporations must be the envy of all other corporations – my God, they make profit, pay their shareholders, pay millions to their CEO’s for merely performing a simple bureaucratic function and with massive government assistance.

The history of providing healthcare in the US is depressing. While European countries and our neighbor to the north moved inexorably toward government funded universal coverage, effort after effort in the United States failed miserably. Proposals were condemned as “socialist” or “communist” or labeled as “interfering with doctor – patient relationships” or a making doctors “slaves”. President Truman’s valiant 1949 effort to provide a national program failed because of powerful conservative opposition from the likes of Senator Robert Taft who claimed it was “right out of the Soviet constitution”. The American Medical Association opposed the program also, with one of their pamphlets reading, “Would socialized medicine lead to socialization of other phases of life? Lenin thought so. He declared that socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the socialist state.”

President Johnson’s “Great Society” efforts in the 1960’s led to Medicare and Medicaid for the elderly and the poor, both supported by the medical establishment, but not to universal coverage for everyone else. President Clinton’s efforts to provide universal coverage, led by then first lady Hillary Clinton, also met with failure because of opposition from health insurance companies and the entire rest of the healthcare industry, exerted through intense lobbying of members of congress.

Another important reason that national healthcare efforts failed over the years was because of the growth of employer-provided health insurance and the companies that administered such plans. During World War II when competition for workers was fierce and employers were not allowed to raise wages, expanding employee benefits was the only way to attract workers so companies began to offer health insurance as one of those benefits. Also of course, companies could deduct the cost of employee health insurance coverage as a cost of doing business. So it’s no surprise that over the years employer provided insurance dampened the demand for universal coverage. The provision of employer provided medical insurance also gave health insurance companies the opportunity to become firmly planted in America’s corporate landscape.

Access to good health insurance is a prominent and consuming concern for most Americans. If your employer covered you and you switched jobs, you might lose your coverage. Employers could change the levels of coverage, requiring larger deductibles or copays to maintain the profit margins for the companies administering the insurance. And buying affordable coverage became almost impossible for the self-employed. I will never forget a statement made by one of my favorite nonfiction authors, Susan Jacoby, remarking in her book “Never Say Die: The Myth and Marketing of the New Old Age”, what an incredible relief it was for her to turn 65 and finally be covered by Medicare. Thank God, the struggles were over – no more worries about medical insurance. One of my brothers, self employed, pays about $25,000 per year to insure him and his spouse and is counting the days to age 65 and Medicare. Another, who receives his medical insurance from his employer, has seen his costs and deductibles rise while his coverage has diminished. And I myself, despite having always worked for employers who covered me and, for an additional charge, the children and the spouse if necessary, the size of deductibles and/or copays was always a concern, as was the cost of drugs required by a family member. And I could still have lost everything I owned if stricken by a catastrophic illness. What a relief for me when I turned 65 and for my spouse when she too became eligible for Medicare, that our worries were over. This is the way it should be for all Americans at all phases of their lives. A Canadian, a Dane, a German, a Frenchman, is simply and logically covered – for everything – no limits or exclusions, from the moment of birth to the moment of death.

The powerful influence of corporations has colored and flavored all recent “advances” in healthcare. First was the intrusion of health insurance corporations into Medicare with “Medicare Advantage” programs, through which they received funds directly from the government to administer and profit from their own enhanced versions of Medicare, further solidifying their positions on the corporate landscape. And the George W. Bush Medicare expansion to provide drug benefits was virtually written by the pharmaceutical corporations, guaranteeing huge profits for themselves through the disallowance of negotiated drug prices. And finally, Obamacare itself was written by the medical insurance companies with the complicity of their congressional lackeys. Retention of private corporations in the program and the exclusion of a “public option” were ways to radically increase the number of their customers at government expense. Like charter schools, the Affordable Care Act became simply another way to shovel public money into corporate coffers.

Obamacare’s invitation to “Come, compare policies and select the one that’s best for you and your family” rings hollow. These “policies” are extremely complex. Who is really prepared to weigh and compare deductibles, exclusions, copays, benefits, networks, costs and the many other variables in a typical health insurance company policy? This complexity is designed to result in one thing – concealment of gradual and incremental cost shifting from the insurer to the patient in order to increase profit, not improve healthcare.

Obamacare’s reliance on the fabled capitalist “market” and “competition” is also chimerical. With insurers now leaving the exchange markets in droves, there will soon be little or no competition. Also, the reduction of insurers into fewer and fewer players through buyouts and mergers will undoubtedly result in market collusion to maintain or improve profit, not competition to improve service or gain customers.

Another problem with Obamacare is administering the mandate requiring individuals to buy insurance and providing the subsidy for those qualified to receive assistance. The “punishment” for not buying insurance, imposed in end-of-year tax returns, is not immediate and therefore not effective. And the subsidies are “tax credits” and whether paid up front or at the end of the year are needlessly complex and confusing. All this complexity is the result of retaining the needless role of private corporations in providing health insurance. And many individuals are opting to remain uninsured and simply pay the penalty.

Many individuals covered by employers or purchasing private insurance prior to the ACA have seen their plans change dramatically, rendering President Obama’s assertion that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s claim that “you can keep your family’s doctor or keep your health care plan if you like it” totally fallacious. What actually happened is that insurers administering employer plans sometimes reduced benefits to match the minimums required under Obamacare or sometimes increased deductibles and/or increased copays. Individual plans also changed shape and size after Obamacare. Many self-employed people or people not covered by employers found plans they had purchased before Obamacare increase in price or reduce benefits.

The claim by Obamacare advocates that “market forces” and “competition” would work to keep prices down and benefits up is also false. When maintaining certain levels of benefits or a low price cuts into profit, those efforts are abandoned. This is why the biggest insurer, United Healthcare, has withdrawn from most state insurance marketplaces and why another healthcare giant, Aetna, has abandoned them altogether.

Obamacare has been reduced to the level that in order to maintain the involvement of private insurers, more government money has to be given to them. And to involve private insurers in the first place, Obamacare is incredibly complex and unwieldy. Just go to the website and take a look at what is offered, how subsidies are offered and so on. Your eyes will glaze over, your heart rate will increase, you will perspire and you will need a dose of healthcare yourself, then and there. And even though you hate your job, you will stick with your present employer because your insurance, no matter how meager, is provided for you. And even though your deteriorating physical condition dictates that you should retire now, you will stagger into work until you are 65 just so you can finally stop worrying about medical insurance. And when you finally do have Medicare, you will realize once and for all how important it is to provide health insurance as a right to everyone, regardless of age, employment, health or income.

Also, another important part of Obamacare, the expansion of Medicaid to cover the poor, was foolishly left up to the discretion of the states. Thus, states whose governors or legislators opposed Obamacare, or likely more accurate, disliked the skin color of our president, rejected Medicaid expansion.

So what to do now? When and how can we look at the provision of healthcare like a grownup nation instead of like an immature teenager, pandering to health insurance companies, and spending twice as much on healthcare as necessary? I am sure that the present difficulties will be handled for now by injecting more government money into the program to prop up insurers’ profits. But only a truly national program, arbitrarily enrolling every American of every age and of every measure of health, will provide a pool large enough that everyone can be covered at a reasonable cost. And the modest tax increase necessary to do this will be more than compensated for by reduced personal costs for each American.

The most recent headline in the Times about Obamacare’s problems, today October 3, 2016, reads, “Ailing Obama Health Care Act May Have to Change to Survive”, introducing an article rehashing much of what I have written above and concluding that inclusion of a public option, dropped during the writing of the law at the behest of private insurers, may now be necessary.

So Obamacare cannot survive as written and surely will die, unless changed completely from what was planned by corporations and their congressional servants. Above I have offered its obituary. Below I suggest an appropriate epitaph:

HERE LIES OBAMACARE
BORN 2010 LIVED BRIEFLY THEN DIED CIRCA 2016
CONCEIVED TO SERVE A PUBLIC NEED
KILLED BY PRIVATE CORPORATE GREED

Several weeks ago while reading my latest New York Review of Books I felt as though my head was about to explode. My mind was on fire trying to understand the concepts and ideas described in two different articles: one reviewing a book about cracking the genetic code and the other reviewing books about black holes and Einstein’s theories. The first dealt with micro concepts, the second with macro. And I struggled mightily with both.

H. Allen Orr’s review of “Life’s Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code” by Matthew Cobb, dealt with DNA and RNA coding, amino acids and the secrets of the genome, heredity, and indeed life itself, all obviously very hard to wrap my head around. The exciting story of Francis Crick and James Watson’s discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule opened the door for much additional fascinating research in molecular mechanics – the nature and composition of DNA, the proteins and amino acids attached in specific patterns to its “double helix” structure, the genes and how all this is packed into our cells and into the egg and sperm launching us into life resembling our parents. Importantly, these discoveries have also provided researchers with the keys to find cures for heretofore incurable genetic diseases. Also DNA research has played an increasingly important role in forensic science, resulting in conviction of the guilty and exoneration of the innocent. But regrettably, this research has also opened the door to “Frankenfoods”, the genetically engineered crops that fatten our livestock, anchor the processed food industry and enrich Monsanto.

Moreover these discoveries are fascinating because somehow they relate to the very nature of life itself – amazingly, all living organisms are made up of the same structures. After the “cracking” of the genetic code, the fundamental discovery was made that the code is nearly universal across all living organisms – “bacteria, fungi, plants and people”. So in our molecular composition, we are more similar to fruit flies and trees than not. All these infinitesimal structures – the proteins, the DNA, the genes, are virtually invisible, but they’re there….in all of us. They make sure we develop as fully formed human beings and not fungi or fruit flies. They signal the right cells to develop properly into bones. muscle, skin, digestive tract, nerve cells, blood and the arteries and veins for its transport. And finally, for better or for worse, they make sure we get the eye color, the hair, the particular nose, the intelligence, the talent, the physical ability, and indeed the emotional qualities and disposition of our parents, all determined by the genes in their DNA.

On this chilly day, while sitting outside for a few moments in the sun enjoying its warmth, I briefly glanced up at this dazzling bright star and wondered about its energy, so bountiful that it’s beyond understanding. I mean, the sun was warming me, warming the deck, the lawn, and all the trees and mountains around me. It was warming the state of Vermont, my home state of Arizona, the whole North American continent and in fact the whole planet. Yet in addition to warming the earth, it warms all the other planets that it illuminates in the solar system. But what about all the sun’s warmth, all the sun’s energy that does not strike our earth or another planet, and which is dissipated in billions of miles of cold empty space? What percentage of the sun’s light and heat goes off into this nothingness and is wasted – maybe 99.99 percent? What an incredible thought – that this bright blazing orb has been burning for millions of years and will burn for millions of more years, and will continue to warm this tiny little bit of the cosmos called earth, and bring it life. Yes, the warmth and light of the sun is the source of all life on earth – its energy transformed into the nourishment that sustains everything.

Other macro thoughts that stagger my mind relate to our solar system, our galaxy and other galaxies. First, it’s terribly hard to understand merely the size of our solar system. But it’s mind-blowing to consider that there must be hundreds (thousands?) more such systems in just our humble galaxy, the Milky Way. And there are millions more suns out there just like ours. And as my mind is stumbling toward some primitive understanding of our solar system and our galaxy, it heats up, flames out and stops working completely when it tries to understand that there are millions (or is it billions?) of other galaxies similar to the Milky Way in the universe.

And the recent news of Juno, our probe to Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, absolutely astonishes me. This cluster of instruments and machinery, assembled and packaged painstakingly here on earth, just traveled 1.7 billion miles to settle into an orbit around Jupiter. It traveled at the incredible rate of 130,000 miles per hour but even at that speed had to travel for five years to cover that distance. And yet this object traveling this far to get a good look at the largest planet in our solar system is really so insignificant since Jupiter, Earth, our entire solar system, and our galaxy are all just a tiny remote and insignificant configuration in the immensity of our galaxy and the universe.

Then just several days ago, a New York Times article described a new array of radio telescopes presently being assembled as a unit in South Africa. And though just in its structural infancy, the first several units in the array reported that in a tiny area of the sky where 70 galaxies had previously been revealed, more than 1300 galaxies were now detected, some “erupting in cataclysms as massive black holes in their hearts spew radioactive high-energy particles across the dark sea of space”. Come now, over a thousand Milky Ways observed in a tiny area of the sky? Absolutely mind-boggling.

Priamvada Natarajan’s article in the New York Review of Books that provoked these “macro” thoughts reviewed two fascinating books concerning Einstein’s concepts and theories about space, time and matter; gravity, black holes and relativity, pretty heavy intellectual lifting for me. For example, how can the speed of light be a constant, coming toward me at the same speed whether I am moving toward the source or away from it? And if the speed of light is constant, then time must become relative, speeding up or slowing down. Can time do this? How?

One of the books reviewed by Natarajan relates the fascinating account of the search for the mythical planet Vulcan. Applying principles of Newtonian physics to the wobble in the the orbit of Uranus led to the discovery of Neptune, so naturally a “tiny hitch” in the orbit of Mercury led astronomers to believe that there was another planet between Mercury and the sun. Not ever finding this planet led to another explanation years later – this by Einstein, that Mercury’s orbital jiggle was caused by a “perturbation resulting from the pocket in space-time created by the sun”, it being an object massive enough to warp space-time.

Other “pockets”, dents or punctures in the space-time fabric posited and described by Einstein are created by black holes, a conception that again, is very difficult to absorb contextually. Black holes are “singularities” formed from collapsed stars possessing a gravity so great that light cannot escape from them and thus are invisible, perceived only because they bend light rays passing by them. As an example, to have the immense gravity of a black hole, “the earth would have to be packed into an object the size of a penny”!

Just as astonishing is the recent news that we have finally detected gravitational waves, which, according to the general theory of relativity, are caused by the collision of black holes. Yes, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory announced the first detection of these gravitational waves at very complex arrays of instruments constructed in Louisiana and Washington. Scientists determined that two black holes, 36 and 29 times the mass of our sun, collided and coalesced into a single black hole 62 time the mass of the sun (how the heck can they know this?).

All these macro concepts discussed in the article surprise, astonish, confound, and ultimately confuse me because I have so little of the prior knowledge context into which to place this information. But thank God there are minds like Einstein’s and those of many other physicists and astronomers today, that are able to grasp and assemble the speed of light, the fabric of space-time, black holes, light years, galaxies, quasars, gravitational waves and the like into cohesive and understandable constructs in their own minds and faithfully and persistently continue to try to impart them to us.

Back to the micro – considering my insignificant aging body and the marvels it contains, it is amazing to consider that the genes I received from my parents and have passed on to my son make us somewhat immortal. Those little pieces of me will go on and on through his children and their children – a little fragment of my intellect, my eyes, my hair color and composition, my stature, my strength, and, God help them all, my personality and disposition – through those little sub-microscopic things called genes.

Another “micro” thought – while science has been able to provide answers to so many questions dealing with life, health and disease, it has never really been able to answer fundamental questions that deal with reproduction and aging. How do all living organisms reproduce themselves? How does an otherwise dead and dormant seed suddenly come to life when encountering warmth, light and moisture? How does a life begin at that magical moment when conception occurs? And this magic of reproduction occurs in all living organisms from the mite, to the fruit fly to the whale. And as mysterious and incomprehensible as all this is, what about the “binary fission” reproduction of bacteria and the six step process of virus replication?

And while so much around me goes through an annual and seasonal cycle of life – the trees, flowers, grass, and the insects, while animals and I are on a longer and more linear cycle of birth, life and death, we really don’t know what causes aging. Indeed, efforts to counter aging, to confound the natural cycle of life, seem to be exercises in hubris and appear insulting in a way – who are we to dare understand aging and death, much less to challenge and try to change the natural order of things?

 While I do not know if there’s a heaven, or if there is, whether I’m going there or not, I have to remind myself that I slept for an eternity before I was born and could simply sleep for another eternity when I die. Our human minds are such that a total obliteration of life when we die is incomprehensible – hence the invention and maintenance of religion, whose primary purpose is to somehow explain death and the purpose of our very finite lives.

In contemplative moments, when thinking about life and death, I sometimes think that when I die I will find myself in a kind of place where all knowledge will somehow be revealed to me. I will suddenly understand everything – all the why’s and wherefore’s relating to the above. I will be able to finally comprehend the content and the dimensions of the universe. Someone will successfully explain gravity to me. I will finally understand how and why every object, all the “stuff” in the universe – the Earth right here under my feet and all of the innumerable other entities near and far – are composed of the very same basic elements that are listed right there on my humble little “Periodic Table”. I will finally understand procreation, birth, life and death. I will finally make sense of stars, galaxies, black holes, infinity and eternity.

All these ruminations, these humble and meager little thoughts and questions that my limited mind conceives, deserve responses, don’t they? It’s not fair that I was blessed with the ability to ponder the questions but cursed with the limited intellect and finite life that prevent me from finding the answers. Yes, all these micro and macro concepts boggle my mind so I guess I should stop complaining, continue to marvel and just be thankful that at my advancing age I still have a mind capable of being boggled.

Whatever happened to the American corporation of the ’50’s. ’60’s and ’70’s? I remember corporations as being good stewards of their communities. I remember CEO’s being paid reasonably and occasionally visiting the factory break room to chat with employees and even taking a stint on the production line to see what it felt like. During those decades American corporations seemed to exhibit a balanced interest in their respective stake-holders: customers, workers and stockholders.

Today that balance is lost: workers’ wages are stagnant and unions are dying and there certainly seems to be much less care about customers. Only the bottom line – profits and share price, in otherwords the stockholders, are truly valued. And one of the foremost corporations in the US, indeed in the world, now the most valuable corporation on the planet, Apple, appears to perfectly mirror this dramatic change. This corporation is now the quintessential embodiment of corporate greed – from obscene profit margins to outsourcing jobs overseas to stashing billions in low-tax havens.

I have always loved Apple products. I experienced them in my various schools as an elementary principal supervising early “computer literacy” programs employing first the venerable Apple IIe, then various versions of the Macintosh including the iMac with its brightly colored translucent plastic case.

The first computer I ever owned was the Apple Iic, replete with the Apple Flat Panel Display, the first portable (somewhat!) computer from Apple. Even though the primitive flat screen was dim and difficult to see without a bright light, I used this computer’s word processing capability to type the entire first draft of my doctoral dissertation in 1985. Then after a multi-decade succession of Windows computers that I used as a professional because of compatibility with the technology used by the various school districts for which I worked, I moved back to Apple computers recently with the purchase of a MacBook Pro laptop on which I am typing this article.

In 2000-2003 when I was a superintendent on the Navajo Reservation I owned a Palm Pilot PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) and was so impressed that I could keep addresses, phone numbers, calendars, notes and lists in this handy little pocket sized instrument. And I could sync it with my office computer as well, to share information between the two. At that time I also used a cell phone for professional business and I remember many times holding my Palm Pilot in one hand to reference a phone number and holding my cell phone in the other awkwardly trying to dial one handed and saying to myself – why the heck doesn’t someone combine these two marvelous devices? Well in 2007 Apple did exactly that and more when they produced the iPhone, the first everything-in-one “smartphone”. I now am on my third iPhone and have loved every one.

But looking back over my technological life, the Apple product that meant the most to me was the iPod. As an avid collector of and listener to all kinds of music, I had spent most of my life wrestling with finding the right LP, then finding the right track or racing through a reel to reel or cassette tape trying to locate the right song or symphony. So you can imagine my dizzy pleasure at being able to place virtually all of my favorite music onto my iTunes music library on my computer and then on that little hard drive miracle, the Apple iPod, where I could easily locate and play whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Also, having purchased many LP’s and CD’s for only a few tracks and rejecting the rest, Apple’s iTunes store provided the opportunity to buy individual songs rather than albums. I simply cannot describe how much the iPod meant to me.

So you can imagine my shock when I attempted last year to buy another 160 GB iPod Classic from the Apple website and found it gone, simply gone, with no warning, no explanation and no announcement. Apple had simply made an arbitrary decision, presumably based on waning sales, that the famous iPod Classic with its huge capacity, distinctive click wheel control – the dream of music lovers like me, had to go. Why? Not enough profit yielded with sales diminishing. Simply a corporate decision based on profit, without the faintest sign of concern for faithful customers. And this after years of ads featuring a smiling (or was it cynical grimace) Steve Jobs extolling the virtues of this marvelous little machine.

Long ago I suspected that Apple might be discontinuing the iPod Classic at some future point but had always fancied that they would replace it with something else with similar or greater capacity. But all that’s left to carry on is the “iPod Touch”, with touch screen, limited capacity, a pile of useless apps and, of all things, a camera – simply an iPhone that you can’t use as a phone. I’m still numb with the realization that the iPod I have is all I ever will have unless I want to pay the grossly inflated prices being charged for the few leftovers still available on E-Bay.

My feeling of injustice at Apple’s discontinuation of the iPod is exacerbated by the iPod’s incredible sales record at Apple over the years. After the return of Steve Jobs the iPod was mainly responsible for the resurgence of Apple after its near-collapse in the late 1990’s, its huge sales carrying Apple until the introduction of the first iPhone. In January 2007, Apple reported record quarterly revenue of $7.1 billion, of which 48% was made from iPod sales. On April 9, 2007, it was announced that Apple had sold its one-hundred millionth iPod, making it the biggest selling digital music player of all time. And as of September 2012, Apple reported that total number of iPods (including the “Touch”) sold worldwide was 350 million.

After the introduction of the iPhone, iPod sales diminished yearly as a percentage of total revenue, not a surprising trend for Apple, as Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer explained in June 2009: “We expect our traditional MP3 players to decline over time as we cannibalize ourselves with the iPod Touch and the iPhone.” Yet one would think that Apple could exhibit a corporate loyalty to the iPod classic somewhat similar to its customers’ loyalty to a music player so important to its financial success. But alas, at Apple there is only one corporate consideration – profits and share price for its stockholders.

Another example of Apple’s heartless, corporate, profit-at-all-costs, consumer-be-damned behavior is with its latest iteration of successive iPhone models. Traditionally, new iPhone models replacing the older ones contained doubled storage capacity for apps, pictures and information. For example the iPhone 4 came with 4, 16 or 32 gigs of storage and my iPhone 5 was available with 16, 32 or 64 gigs of storage. So when I shopped for my iPhone 6s I was amazed to find that the storage in the middle and top models was indeed doubled – to 64 and 128 gigs respectively, but the least expensive model, which I had planned to purchase, was still a measly 16 gigs, in spite of expanded storage requirements for its new camera and video capabilities. Apple had cleverly decided not to double the storage for the entry level model, assuming correctly that customers would need to buy the 64 gig model for $100 more. If the storage had been doubled for the entry level model to 32 gigs as I had expected, it would have been perfectly adequate for me and a host of other customers. Incidentally it costs Apple less than $20 to increase the storage from 16 gigs to 64, so they made an extra $80 profit on the thousands of these phones sold.

In addition, Apple has a nasty habit of changing other features so the customer has to buy extras. I was very disappointed to see that the connector on my iPhone 5 had changed from the 30 pin connector used on the iPod classic and the iPhone 4 to the new “Lightning” 8 pin connector, requiring the purchase of expensive converters, from Apple, of course, for my older chargers. And Apple connectors seem to always be proprietary, used only on their products and no others. Again, I suspect, despite being cloaked in terms like improvement, efficiency and convenience, changing these connectors was simply another way to increase profits.

Gone?

And the latest tech gossip indicates that Apple is about to get rid of the headphone jack on its iPhones and replace them with some new kind of proprietary connection. Yes, just like Apple, yet another way to force customers to buy more and consequently increase profits. This change, if it occurs, is especially egregious, because the headphone jack is truly one of the few tech intercompatability standards left – I can plug virtually any headphones or earbuds into my Apple devices, other brands of tech devices, my stereo equipment. and the exercise machines at my gym. But if Apple has its way….and it likely will…. this will no longer be the case.

Apple has demonstrated its corporate greed in many other ways. It has continued to stick it to the American worker by assembling most of its products in China. But this has not made its products any cheaper – Apple continues to sell the most expensive computers and smartphones on the market, offers no discounts on its website or in its stores and has carefully limited discounts offered by retailers licensed to sell Apple products. Apple could easily afford to discount its products from time to time. Again, to hell with the consumer, but hail to the investor.

The young, well-informed, animated, energetic and enthusiastic people that work at Apple Stores all over the country are paid surprisingly low wages for the work they do for the wealthiest corporation in the world. They are not only salespeople – they are helpers, advisors and unabashed fans of Apple products. All should be paid appropriately – no less than $50,000 a year, instead of the measly $30,000 or so they earn now. Apple could easily afford to pay its store employees what they’re worth, not what the market will bear.

And Apple continues to operate with the largest profit margin of any tech company, averaging about 40 percent across all its products with iPhone profit at an ungodly margin as high as 69 percent. For example, costs range from $200 to $247 for iPhone 6 models that sell in the US for $649 and $849 without a contract.

With profits like this, Apple could well afford to be the model US corporation. It could demonstrate care for the US economy by manufacturing in the US instead of China and providing these US employees adequate compensation. And it could have emulated the fabled loyalty of its customers by continuing to manufacture the iPod classic with the sacrifice of a mere tiny sliver of its massive profits. Really, Apple could become the perfect “retro” US corporation, raising its concern for workers, customers and its corporate community to the level of its concern for share price and investors, with little cost to its bottom line.

But what does Apple do instead? The most valuable corporation in the US and in the world provides the most glaring example of corporate greed and national disloyalty by continuing to sacrifice the US worker and economy by manufacturing overseas and betraying its parent country by stashing its billions of obscene profits overseas, avoiding taxes, creating shell corporations and playing the tax avoidance game better than anyone else. Indeed the “most valuable corporation in the world” has disgracefully led the way in minimizing its taxes “better than anyone else in the world”.

Maybe Apple should heed the advice that the visionary leader of Intel, the late Andy Grove, offered in an oft-quoted essay he wrote in 2010 for Bloomberg. Grove warned that tech companies’ refusal to “scale up” their latest gadgets for manufacture in the US and rely instead upon the financial advantages of manufacturing in Asia was a serious mistake. It not only strikes a blow to the workers and the economy of the US but also allows the Asian country to develop the engineering skills and know-how that would have nourished the company’s potential for successful future innovation. In Mr. Grove’s words, ”Without scaling, we don’t just lose jobs – we lose our hold on new technologies. Losing the ability to scale will ultimately damage our capacity to innovate.” Keeping the brains, design and finance in the US and the manufacturing in Asia will ultimately backfire on us. It might be worth noting that in 2010 when Grove’s article was written, Chinese tech manufacturer Foxconn (where Apple products are assembled) employed more people – 800,000 in total – than Sony, Intel, Apple, Dell, Microsoft and HP combined. This company now employs over 1.3 million workers, all engaged in tech manufacturing that could and should easily be done here in the United States. Unfortunately, an important part of every tech start-up’s business plan is a “China strategy”. And Apple leads the way.

A final issue – maybe I’m wrong, but the revered, iconic and godlike Steve Jobs has always seemed as pecuniary as the company he named. In contrast to other billionaires, who are busy curing disease and empowering women and the poor all over the world (Bill Gates) or have pledged to give all their billions away (Warren Buffet), what did Steve Jobs or his heirs do with his estate of roughly $19 billion? Where is the “Steve Jobs Foundation”? Any diseases cured? Any wells dug? Any hungry people fed? How have his billions benefitted mankind? Just asking.

Perhaps Apple should critically examine its short-sighted profit-at-all-cost and consumers-be-damned corporate philosophy before it’s too late. Recent headlines from the New York Times: IPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs; from the UK’s Daily Mail: Apple Watch is a FLOP: Sales of the gadget have fallen by 90% since April, report claims and from a recent issue of Fortune: Apple Watch Sales Have Plummeted, Analyst Says, may be prescient.