Downside
I have to wonder whether the NY Times’s assertion that “a sizable part of the nation is unenthusiastic” about the health care [insurance] reform bill is another example of their Judith Miller reportage – i.e., we got it from a press release transfusion – or whether it’s more simply the usual broad-brush approach to analysis media outlets seem prone to indulge in for sales purposes. Yes, there’s much to disparage, and yes, many people wish the outcome had been different, but the majority of Americans elected this President and this Congress with the knowledge that “socialised” medicine was on the agenda, among other things, no less so than closing Guantanamo or getting out of Iraq, also recognising, one would hope that none of these issues were any less fraught than another, although that’s clearly hoping for too much. The “tea baggers” – and who among them could possibly be so naïve as to have missed out the alt-sex nuances of the phrase (oh, right, all of them) – and their GOP enablers have decided that a black President and a Democratic Congress must equate to the apocalypse, but anyone capable of taking a deep breath and not triggering an embolism must know that however flawed the present bill really is, and it is, the modern world does not, cannot, allow its population to rely for health care on catch-as-catch can “market forces” because that only leaves the most vulnerable, the most likely to succumb most disastrously to even the most common ailments, unprotected, and solely to maintain an unequable distinction to the least vulnerable. This is the same thinking that has led to CEO salaries of 250% more than the lowest paid workers in some companies, a variable that used to be magnitudes more reasonable, and yet the selfishness on parade is being exhibited by thousands of people who fall into exactly these categories, as if precluding government intervention in such areas would ever give them a chance to close either gap. The “American Dream” has, at least since the so-called Regan Era, become the American Mythology, and many of us now worship these false idols. The wake-up call cannot come soon enough, but I fear for the nature of the alarm.
23 March 2010
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3 comments:
The polling data seems pretty suspect to me, and Nate Silver agrees. As a general proposition polling data needs to be taken with a grain of salt. The actual questions-- and even the order in which they are asked- are proprietary, so we never see them. When we are talking about polls concerning legislation the chances that the survey population knows *anything* is pretty small, and this probably accounts for some of the disparity between the percentage of people who disprove of the bill and the percentage who approve of the things the bill does.
The thing that has troubled me over the course of this is the fact that the media has apparently decided that it has no real responsibility to fact-check the assertions about the legislation that were made. It treated it all as though they were merely opinions, and as though all opinions have equal validity. Of course that's ridiculous-- it seems to be what passes for objectivity. The net effect, of course, is that the discussion gets hijacked by whoever is prepared to make the most outrageous claims.
Indeed, there were unchallenged and outrageous lies told with a straight face by the likes of John boehner and his ilk but part of the disparity in the "opinions" of us masses is probably due to where thase opinions were solicitied. Living as we do in an area almost totally covered by Medicare, Medicaid or emergency care only, the remarkable selfishness of that first group took my breath away. We all HAVE socialized medicine and not one of us wants to give it back. Meanwhile, the great need to require that our local governmental bodies start their every meeting with a "Christian prayer because we are a Christian country" drives me wild. The whole point of Christ was to explain that god wants all his people to take care of the poor and most vulnerable. Don't these people KNOW that!!!
Well, anyway. Hurray for the Dem.s with the courage to step up. Godspeed to their labors. It's a start.
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