Not too far down in the comments section a poster by the name of "Bonkers" presents this little nugget:
"Thank you for mentioning the potential loss of their home for medical bills. The insane right has been yammering on and on about how these “affleunt” homeowners should not have been able to receive any government assistance in the care of their critically injured children. No, according to those filthy rejects, people should lose everything they own, even their modest homes and fair-to-middlin’ privately owned small businesses, in order to save their children (or themselves, for that matter). And naturally, their brain dead listeners, most of whom would be in the same spot as the Frosts should they encounter a medical catastrophe, can’t muster the empathy to realize that it could well be THEM next.
What righties really want to make is [s]o that any kind of government aid will only go to the most impoverished of Americans, so that they can THEN snidely call it a welfare program, thereby making it easier to work up their usually attack machines in order to cut funds or close it down altogether."
I rave madly and reference the Harvard study on a nearly daily basis. My spouse has more than once that I "should be on something" for that. So "Bonkers'" first paragraph is familiar terrain for me. I would ammend their comments, likely with their consent, to include those families with insurance because we all know private health care coverage is no better than a New Orleans levee when catastrophe strikes. You'll still go bankrupt.
But that second paragraph. That's the money shot.
Thanks, Bonkers.
And good health to you.
Somewhere out there is a Reservist family in the same situation as the Frosts, I would suspect. Statistically it's within reason to hazard the guess.
3 comments:
Worst aspect of the healthcare insurance struggle is that, as shrimplate points out, the insurance doesn't buy you healthcare. Big ticket health problems will bankrupt anyone.
What the country needs is health care. Bypass the insurance industry.
from Ruth
anonymous and shrimplate:
You are making the assumption that these people give a hoot, or would if they understood.
They don't give a hoot. Many of them realize exactly what is happening, and are not fooled at all, but we as a society have gone, directed by the far right, from a society in which we felt that some things were for the common good, to a society in which for better or worse, many people are mean-spirited and it actually makes them feel good if they can at least by proxy squeeze someone else until they bleed, be it poor people, minorities, immigrants, gay people, in fact anyone at all they can screw over. I've encountered it, people who in effect say 'I got mine, and #### on you.'
What the conservative right want, more than anything else, is to do away with any sort of social welfare programs--programs designed to benefit the lives of all Americans. They would target programs to help single parents struggling to rise above poverty; they would target programs to help mentally and/or physically disabled children who have inordinate, never-ending requirements for day-to-day living; they would target anything that would ask the American people to collectively shoulder a minuscule burden that would provide a significant benefit for some or take a massive burden off another.
Such mentality finds its basis in the maxim that charity like this should not be mandatory. When I was much younger and much more stupid, I used to buy that line. But the reality is that reliance on the charity of the body politick is what brought us to implement these kinds of programs in the first place.
The idea that an individual citizen bear a proportionately minor burden in order to better provide for those who are unable to provide for themselves is a basic expression of how we are all part of the same human condition. Instead of understanding the circumstances of those less advantaged or less able as "there but for the grace of God ..." and living the universal rule (the Golden Rule) of "do unto others ...," the conservative right latches on to any rationale, no matter how tenuous, that allows them to denigrate or vilify those less fortunate and instead view them as some "other" and say, "Glad it isn't me."
It is a repugnant mentality and represents probably the lowest form of human thought. It is the same mentality on display in Darfur, Rwanda, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, the darker corners of Imperialist England, or any other social order that puts all but the most advantaged into some class of "other" and to which any caricature can be applied, not matter how inappropriate.
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