I wondered for a long time if Republican education policy, for example No Child Left Behind, was really an attempt to destroy public education and render Americans stupid. It’s a little conspiracy theorist, but consider the ways conservative talking points dismantle education: “evolution is just a theory,” for example. Standardized testing puts the thrust of classroom time on passing tests, not on actually learning.
What strikes me about our current national debate (both on health care and the whole birther thing, which are related) is that if some of the people participating in the town hall shenanigans had just learned a thing or two about American history, or if they’d even just been taught the critical thinking skills to sort out what’s true and what’s completely unreasonable, none of this would be happening.
Not to be a conspiracy theorist.
I’m not sure what I can add to this debate (if it can even be called a “debate”) because I believe Obama is the legit president (hell, I voted for him) and I believe that the US is in dire need of health care reform and I strongly support the public option. I’m all for single-payer healthcare, in fact. That’s the wild thing about this “debate”; so many of the people decrying the public option are on Medicare, which is… single-payer, government-run health insurance.
I went 10 months without health insurance in 2007, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what some people go through, although I did injure my foot and wind up in the ER during that time. I lucked out and had read an article about what to do in NYC if you need a doctor but don’t have insurance, so I went to a public ER with a sliding scale payment system, and the ER visit wound up costing me a mere $45. I spent 8 hours in the hospital, though, and the verdict was that I had a sprain and there wasn’t really anything the doctor could do for me anyway. That strikes me as… inefficient.
I have insurance now through my employer, and it covers most things, although I’m learning that there’s a really limited number of doctors who will take my insurance. So health care isn’t rationed? I had a doctor that I liked and trusted that I can’t afford to see anymore because she doesn’t take my insurance.
So, I’ve seen first-hand how fucked the system is. A Brit acquaintance of mine said to me just yesterday that the American healthcare system boggled his mind. (And I love this whole Stephen Hawking thing, where in an editorial argued that the British NHS would have killed poor Hawking who is a British citizen who has stated that he owes his life to care he got from the NHS. A lot of forehead slapping is going on during this debate.)
I feel like this is common sense. Is it possible that there are any Americans that don’t at least know someone struggling without proper care? There are better alternatives to the current system! The NHS and Canada’s systems have their flaws, and taxes are higher in France, but these are proof that viable systems where all citizens have access to care exist! And it’s a “public option” we’re looking at, not even a single-payer system, and the option is intended to make health insurance companies more competitive, which theoretically will motivate them to cover more people in an effort to get more business. (You don’t even have to get health care from the government! You can still get it from your profit-motivated insurance company if that’s what you want! Crazy, right?)
So what’s with all the crazy at the town halls?
A lot of the misinformation has already been widely debunked, but there are a few things happening that hit me. First, there’s this lady crying about wanting her country back. Yeah, how do you think I feel, lady? Bush spent 8 years in office after the questionable election of 2000, but Obama’s in office for 8 months and people are crying. It’s hard not to imagine that part of her sobbing here is related to thinking that Obama is an illegitimate president, or that he’s hijacked the country somehow, which I can’t help but think is an argument built at least in part on racism.
It struck me today when reading about Katy Abram, a woman who became an instant pundit by attending a town hall, that if we did a better job teaching our citizens about our history and the way our government really works, this debate would be a different beast. Abram has been all over the cable news, and it’s clear from watching the clips that she’s well-meaning but doesn’t have much grasp on what the real issues are or even American history. Her argument is that universal health care is not constitutional. I think she misunderstands the constitution.
I’ve seen it quoted by some of the astro-turfers that Jefferson advocated periodic revolutions. (If you can call some shouting at the urging of right-wing corporate groups and talk-radio jockeys a “revolution.”) Jefferson was obviously an advocate of revolution since he participated in one. I think Jefferson would be surprised that the Constitution he helped write is still the one we follow, because he also believed that the Constitution would need to be completely rewritten every so often. He was forward thinking enough to know that the needs of The People would change over time. Medical care in Jefferson’s time was a different beast entirely, so I’m not sure he could have foreseen 21st century healthcare, but it says right there in the preamble to his Constitution that We The People established that Constitution to promote, among other things, the general welfare of the people. That seems plain enough to me.
Some of the people gaining a voice on the cable news cycles are people like Orly Taitz, Queen of the Birthers, who came across as completely unhinged in this Salon interview. And people follow her I think in part because they don’t know better. Rachel Maddow showed a poll on her show last night indicating that something like 12% of the American people didn’t think or weren’t sure that Hawaii was a state. Hawaii became a state in 1959, 2 years before Obama was born there. You know, I’ve got one of those Certificate of Live Birth thingies. Mine is from the state of Ohio, which is where I was born, and I got it before a trip I made to Canada in 1996, back when a birth certificate was all you needed to cross the border. If mine was good enough to get me back into the states after the sojourn to Quebec, Obama’s is good enough to prove he’s the president.
How much is racism the motivation behind the birther movement, a way to give legitimacy to the argument that a black man is not qualified to be president? More to the point, why do people with views as out there as Taitz’s have a voice in the national media at all?
The birthers and the astro-turfer anti-healthcare-reform people are related in that both have movements that are gaining momentum based on a platform of misinformation, ignorance, and misplaced anger. I wish the news media would just stop paying attention to any of them, because it makes them think they’re winning, and then it all just gets more ridiculous. It distorts the debate. I’d bet the majority of Americans, those of us with first-hand experience with how fucked the current health care situation is in this country, those of us who react negatively to violence, those of us who took the time to find out what’s really in the bill, we want real reform. We are not represented in the media, not even in the liberal media. Rachel Maddow, even, has spent a lot of time each night on the hijinks at the town halls.
Incidentally, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont is on Maddow right now saying that this nonsense detracts from the debate, and he points out that the US spends more per capita on health care than any other nation, and 45 million people are still uninsured. THANK YOU, Bernie Sanders. Why are we even arguing about this?
Bonus links!
GOP is kind of looking the other way when the town halls get violent. (Apparently Obama gets 30 death threats a day!)
Betsy McCaughey derailed health care reform during the Clinton administration and she’s doing it again. James Fallows says that he thought contemporary methods of disseminating information meant that lies wouldn’t get any traction. Whoops!
A primer on the Tea Parties. “A day after one of North Dakota’s largest-ever tea parties, at the courthouse in Grand Forks, the only thing I can say with certainty about the movement is that it’s mostly about making funny signs and producing lots of unintentional irony. And anger. Plentiful, seething, soul-rooted and only vaguely-focused anger. And maybe racism.”
Also, I’m wondering if these guys have never heard the Nazi Rule of Internet Debates, which states that “Once you invoke Hitler or the Nazis, the debate is over.” Whosoever mentions Hitler or the Nazis first effectively shuts down the debate, because you can’t argue with them after that. So… Obama is like Hitler? Is that the current meme? Because he wants a public option for non-old people so that they can enjoy the same kind of health care that most senior citizens enjoy under Medicare. Because the new bill covers the time your doctor spends helping you write a living will so that you can have control over what happens to you should you become unable to make your own medical decisions? I’ve got some bones to pick with Obama, but really? Really?
So: the Nazi rule states that you can’t argue with these people anymore. End of debate.
