Personally, I have only shallow thoughts on the American health care debate. Any attempt on my part to articulate a response to the notion that Paris Hilton could possibly deserve better health care than a factory farm-raised chicken, never mind an actual human being, immediately devolves into a scream of impotent fury. So here’s what some other people are saying about the current situation:
“When I was a kid growing up, we never talked about health care. Why did America become obsessed with health care the past twenty years or so? And you know what else we didn’t talk about when I was a kid? Black people. Good times, good times…” – Peggy Noonan
“OK, they’re distracted, quick, give me my bonus.” – Anonymous Goldman-Sachs executive
“My husband Ted and I are diabetic, unemployed, and have no health insurance, and we don’t want the government forcing us to get health care, no way. Just the other day I was saying to Ted, I said, ‘You know what we’ve got too many of? Feet.’” – Gun and fried Mars bar enthusiast Luanne Woodard
“So who do I have to free to get some media coverage around here?” – Kim Jong-il
“Hey, who’s the bartender and who’s the white house Chief of Staff here? That’s right, so do your goddamn job and give me another shot, liquorchimp! …So like I was saying, we’re totally gonna kill all the old people. I mean, it’s not like they’re our base, so fuck ‘em. This is off the record, right?” – Rahm “Spaceknight” Emmanuel
“Let me get this straight: they show up at public events, try to derail real discussion of the issues by being loud, belligerent assholes, and get on the news? Unbelievable. They stole my bit.” – Westboro Baptist Church minister and flamboyant gay activist Fred Phelps
“Jesus Christ, Mom. I’m like a year old and have downs syndrome and even I know that’s bullshit.” – Trig Palin
“Iz in ur Oh-Arr, yoothanizin ur gramma.” – Universal Health Kitteh
“They’re actually having a debate about this? What the fuck is wrong with them?“ – Pretty much every non-US citizen in the entire world
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No kitten mascot! Of course! Thats where Obama and his people have gone wrong. Even the nuttiest of far-right conservatives would be no match for an adorable kitty cat!
The rampant nonsense that these people throw around about the health care bill is absolutely amazing. It’s so far fetched that I just can’t believe that people would buy it, but sure enough, I hear about people calling my state congressman (Democrat) every day to complain about how he voted for a bill that’s going to kill all the old people.
Ridiculous!
You say that now. But in 73 years, when you’re forced to wait in line for your government sponsored fully synthetic robot body, we’ll all be buried in our Christian plots, safe with our piles of untaxed money and our fully automatic death cannons.
So HAHA!
This is actually some of the most cogent and rational analysis I’ve seen on the topic in a while. That’s either awesomely hysterical or terribly frightening. 🙂
Kudos for the Rom reference, sir.
Unbe-frakking-lievable! Or not. I don’t wish to generalise, but is it possible that these people who believe blatant lies are also the ones who believe that the earth is 6000 years old.
Because if that’s true, then they’ve had plenty of experience ignoring anything that opposes their beliefs.
I’m just thankful I’m not the only one who puts ‘spaceknight’ after ‘Rahm’.
The description “flamboyant gay activist” applied to Fred Phelps made this worth reading all by itself. 🙂
““They’re actually having a debate about this? What the fuck is wrong with them?“ – Pretty much every non-US citizen in the entire world”
Hey, take it easy on the Americans. After all, they’re the richest and most powerful nation on Earth. You can’t expect them to do what countries with a fraction of their resources are able to do.
The challenge is Americans have no good frame of reference on a national health care system. The national health care we have is reserved for old and poor people (Medicare). It doesn’t provide across the board quality services. So the perception is, the only reason you get “national” care is because you are no longer a contributing member of society.
It’s not reality, but it’s a very hard mindset to shift. People are willing to believe that a change to health care is bad because of fear. If a shift in health care doesn’t work- then we have a REAL problem. There’s a lot of devil you do vs devil you don’t here.
What’s going to change the tone- swine flu combined with high unemployment. The folks who lost jobs over a year ago are running out of COBRA coverage. You have the US getting pasted with swine flu and people feeling they can’t go to the doctor because of no coverage…should make for good times.
Clara, you’re totally off base. This has nothing to do with Medicare being for old “unproductive” people. The Republicans (with Ronald Reagen on the point) were arguing against Medicare back in the 60s with the same bullshit claims – abortion for all, government owned hospitals, murdered old people – they are using today.
During the 80s and 90s, we went through a privatization fetish, where all industry and services needed to be privately owned and operated. We privatized large parts of Medicare, the military, the bureaucracy, tax collection, and – under Bush – we even tried to privatize Social Security. Privatization is fucking expensive (because the middle men all need to take a healthy cut), but it was sold as a way to save money.
Now, for reasons I don’t understand, people are still convinced that government run anything will fail miserably. This combines with a national phobia of taxes – again, under the assumption that if the government takes your money to do something, it’ll cost you more in the end than if you just bought the good or service yourself.
The last eight years have been the result. The government runs up a huge debt fighting abroad while letting government services languish at home. When something breaks, rather than raise taxes and fix it, we contract out the job to the private sector – giving us toll roads and ballooning energy prices and sub prime mortgage loans attached to unregulated investment funds.
We use private insurance for the same reason we’ve got Halliburton and Boeing running our military, Wall Street running our Treasury, and a handful of millionaire construction/management companies running our infrastructure. Because there’s so much damn money in milking the dumb old tax payer by charging him $5 a day just to get to fucking work in exchange for a few hundred dollars in tax breaks.
Zifnab: I don’t think Clara’s saying the “old, useless” perception of medicare is warranted or accurate, just that it’s there and is affecting opinion on a public option.
Personally, the whole thing has made me realize, that yes, I am in fact, a socialist.
I’m 32. I’m single. And I’m utterly unisurable on the private market. Meaning that for the rest of my life I have to be able to maintain full time employement at a large corporation.
Or marry a canadian and move north.
Something is wrong with the math here.
A little bit of background on health care in the U.S., for our foreign friends and any Americans who don’t have it:
The system of employers providing private insurance came during World War II. The government instituted wage freezes. Employers still needed ways to attract the best employees, sot they got around wage freezes by offering benefits. Health insurance was one of the benefits that became common at the time, and it has stuck ever since.
There you have it. America’s health care debacle: one more thing we can blame on the Nazis.
On the American phobia of taxes: government services are the ultimate form of buying in bulk, which we learn in home economics 101 is an easy way to save money. The argument that you don’t get to decide what is done with your tax money is a much more reasonable argument.
“Hey, take it easy on the Americans. After all, they’re the richest and most powerful nation on Earth. You can’t expect them to do what countries with a fraction of their resources are able to do.”
Jeez, I wonder how they got so rich. Probably from meanness or something.
Civil Health War: I’m with Norabombay.
Fortunately, Vancouver is a 2-hour drive away.
One of the things it comes down is that America still thinks of itself as a frontier nation. We still sell ourselves the self-reliance line as a frontier nation. That’s where the “America: Love it or leave it” line comes from — the vestigial unconscious belief that when you don’t like where you live, you head a few hundred miles out west and make your fortunes there, so you have nothing to complain about.
This is basically thought of as making your own little slice of Heaven, so to speak. The best life is one you’re supposedly able to make for yourself. Other people can do nothing but interfere with you. The kneejerk reaction is protectionist, on the individual, community, and national level.
Of course, this line of thinking is ridiculously out-of-date. There’s no place left to go. We’re stuck here. The last possible frontier labor markets got filled up in the 40s, with the mass migration to the southwest. But we still believe that. We’ve got at least three generations here raised on that old rhetoric and they’re clinging to it.
And that reflects in our government. For all that it does, the United States government is designed to leave people alone and be left alone. And the American mindset is breed to be left alone. That’s what we need to wake up out of.
Americans don’t eat fried Mars bars. You never even see Mars bars in stores.
[…] Guest Blogger Andrew Foley Over at Mightygodking on the Health Care Debate: http://mightygodking.com/index.php/2009/08/10/deep-thoughts-on-the-great-health-care-debate-of-09/ […]
“Now, for reasons I don’t understand, people are still convinced that government run anything will fail miserably.”
For added hilarity, these folks also tend to be pro-military and usually pro-war.
Apparently, government is only evil and incompetent when it’s _not_ blowing people up.
The British Government is to send Lord Darzi, a former helath minister, to do the US tv shows to refute a lot of the rubbish being said about the NHS. Lord Darzi, who can save a man’s life and stop them breaking the law:
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/Sky-News-Archive/Article/20080641293463
(It’s illegal to die in Parliament. The sentence for the crime is somewhat unclear though…)