![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oselleI think I'm done. I've been putting up post after post about healthcare and the disgraceful, shameful and enraging behavior that's been going on in this country and I just really don't see the point in continuing anymore.
I think the battle is lost. Hell, the whole war is lost. I read the other day that fully one-third of people polled don't know that Medicare is a government program, while another 15% "aren't sure." That's more than half of the respondents. Among these people are the imbeciles who've been running around with posters of Obama sporting a Hitler moustache and other assholes who've been showing up at public meetings brandishing assault rifles and saying that people had better just get accustomed to seeing such brazen displays of public intimidation.
Just this minute I saw a clip on television of a woman in nearly hysterical tears, telling the Republican Senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, that her husband had suffered a truamatic brain injury and her insurance company won't pay for the nursing care he needs to eat and drink and she can't get him to eat. Coburn muttered something about how he'd see to it that she got some help and then went on to say that what we really need to think about is being good neighbors. In other words, this woman really ought to count on her neighbors -- not the government -- to assist with her husband's specialized, round-the-clock nursing care.
And people in the audience applauded.
I'm done. I'm done. I just want to say, congratulations to the conservatives out there. You've courageously saved us from falling into lockstep with every other developed, civilized nation in the world. You've ensured that only the deserving, properly employed members of society will be rewarded with the privilege of decent medical care (provided they have no pre-existing conditions or suffer any catastrophic accidents which would most likely be their own fault and for which they should be rightfully punished). You've guaranteed millions of Americans the freedom to live in constant pain or disability or to die, and the ennobling liberty of relying upon some sporadic milk of human kindness for their healthcare needs. You've made certain that our benevolent corporate overlords in the insurance and medical industries will continue to enjoy the lavish lifestyles they so richly deserve. And best of all, you've really shown the world what we're made of. Thank you.
As a parting gift, three links.
From The New York Times, The Guns of August:
Those on the right who defend the reckless radicals inevitably argue “The left does it too!” It’s certainly true that both the left and the right traffic in bogus, Holocaust-trivializing Hitler analogies, and, yes, the protesters of the antiwar group Code Pink have disrupted Congressional hearings. But this is a false equivalence. Code Pink doesn’t show up on Capitol Hill with firearms. And, as the 1960s historian Rick Perlstein pointed out on the Washington Post Web site last week, not a single Democratic politician endorsed the Weathermen in the Vietnam era.
From The Washington Post, Five Myths About Healthcare Around The World:
All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess. Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.
From the UK's The Guardian, Dying for affordable healthcare — the uninsured speak:
She rattles off a litany of horror stories. There was the man who walked into the clinic with a brain tumour. It took Lee three months to get him an MRI scan and another two to get an appointment with a neurosurgeon. Or the patient whose nerves in his neck were pushed against his spinal cord so that he lost use of both arms; by the time Lee found a way of getting him an MRI he was so sick he had to be operated on immediately. Or the woman who had such heavy periods she would wind up in ER every three months requiring a blood transfusion. What she really needed was a hysterectomy. "It took us almost a year to beg hospitals until she finally did get a hysterectomy," Lee says. These are the stories, the broken lives, that have been obscured by the fury generated by the Republican rump.
"Here's what I'd like to ask Palin," Lee says. "People without health insurance are dying, here in America, right now. So I'd like to ask her: how does that fit into your vision of good and evil, Sarah Palin?"
I think the battle is lost. Hell, the whole war is lost. I read the other day that fully one-third of people polled don't know that Medicare is a government program, while another 15% "aren't sure." That's more than half of the respondents. Among these people are the imbeciles who've been running around with posters of Obama sporting a Hitler moustache and other assholes who've been showing up at public meetings brandishing assault rifles and saying that people had better just get accustomed to seeing such brazen displays of public intimidation.
Just this minute I saw a clip on television of a woman in nearly hysterical tears, telling the Republican Senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, that her husband had suffered a truamatic brain injury and her insurance company won't pay for the nursing care he needs to eat and drink and she can't get him to eat. Coburn muttered something about how he'd see to it that she got some help and then went on to say that what we really need to think about is being good neighbors. In other words, this woman really ought to count on her neighbors -- not the government -- to assist with her husband's specialized, round-the-clock nursing care.
And people in the audience applauded.
I'm done. I'm done. I just want to say, congratulations to the conservatives out there. You've courageously saved us from falling into lockstep with every other developed, civilized nation in the world. You've ensured that only the deserving, properly employed members of society will be rewarded with the privilege of decent medical care (provided they have no pre-existing conditions or suffer any catastrophic accidents which would most likely be their own fault and for which they should be rightfully punished). You've guaranteed millions of Americans the freedom to live in constant pain or disability or to die, and the ennobling liberty of relying upon some sporadic milk of human kindness for their healthcare needs. You've made certain that our benevolent corporate overlords in the insurance and medical industries will continue to enjoy the lavish lifestyles they so richly deserve. And best of all, you've really shown the world what we're made of. Thank you.
As a parting gift, three links.
From The New York Times, The Guns of August:
Those on the right who defend the reckless radicals inevitably argue “The left does it too!” It’s certainly true that both the left and the right traffic in bogus, Holocaust-trivializing Hitler analogies, and, yes, the protesters of the antiwar group Code Pink have disrupted Congressional hearings. But this is a false equivalence. Code Pink doesn’t show up on Capitol Hill with firearms. And, as the 1960s historian Rick Perlstein pointed out on the Washington Post Web site last week, not a single Democratic politician endorsed the Weathermen in the Vietnam era.
From The Washington Post, Five Myths About Healthcare Around The World:
All the other developed countries have settled on one model for health-care delivery and finance; we've blended them all into a costly, confusing bureaucratic mess. Which, in turn, punctures the most persistent myth of all: that America has "the finest health care" in the world. We don't. In terms of results, almost all advanced countries have better national health statistics than the United States does. In terms of finance, we force 700,000 Americans into bankruptcy each year because of medical bills. In France, the number of medical bankruptcies is zero. Britain: zero. Japan: zero. Germany: zero.
From the UK's The Guardian, Dying for affordable healthcare — the uninsured speak:
She rattles off a litany of horror stories. There was the man who walked into the clinic with a brain tumour. It took Lee three months to get him an MRI scan and another two to get an appointment with a neurosurgeon. Or the patient whose nerves in his neck were pushed against his spinal cord so that he lost use of both arms; by the time Lee found a way of getting him an MRI he was so sick he had to be operated on immediately. Or the woman who had such heavy periods she would wind up in ER every three months requiring a blood transfusion. What she really needed was a hysterectomy. "It took us almost a year to beg hospitals until she finally did get a hysterectomy," Lee says. These are the stories, the broken lives, that have been obscured by the fury generated by the Republican rump.
"Here's what I'd like to ask Palin," Lee says. "People without health insurance are dying, here in America, right now. So I'd like to ask her: how does that fit into your vision of good and evil, Sarah Palin?"