The first and last word on the health care debate……..I admit it might be a little melodramatic-but is anything the tea bag nation says about us supporters any less caustic? Nope, nada, zilch. This is what their overheated, and incredibly hysterical rhetoric drives otherwise reasonable people to. There is nothing “compassionate” about conservatism-the argument that there are loads and loads of “freeloaders” out there trying to cheat teabaggers out their hard earned dollars is central to their orthodoxy. Real hardship and a desire to make changes that float all boats in society are foreign concepts to them. It just has to mean that someone is getting something “for nothing”. Except when they get something for nothing…………then its their “right under the Constitution”.
The Party of Cruelty
By James Howard Kunstler
on March 22, 2010 7:13 AM
It was amusing to see the Republican party inveigh against health insurance reform as if they were a synod of Presbyterian necromancers girding the nation for a takeover by the spawn of hell. This was the same gang, by the way, who championed the Medicare Prescription Drug Improvement and Modernization Act of 2003, then regarded as the most reckless giveaway of public funds in human history. Along the way, they enlisted an army of nay-sayers representing everything dark, disgraceful, and ignorant in the American character. If the Republicans keep going this way, they’ll end up with something worse than Naziism: a party that hates everything but believes in absolutely nothing.
The most striking elements of so-called health care in America these days is how cruel and unjust it is, and in taking a stand against reforming it the Republican party appeared to be firmly in support of cruelty and injustice. This would be well within the historical tradition of other religious crusades which turned political — such as the Spanish Inquisition and the seventeenth century war against witchcraft. Whatever else the Democratic party has stood for in recent history, it has tended to oppose institutional cruelty and injustice, and notice that it has also been the party for keeping religion out of government.
Now a health care reform act has passed and there’s some reason to hope that insurance companies will be prevented from doing things like canceling the coverage of policy-holders who have the impertinence to actually get sick, which has been their main device for revenue enhancement, and we’ll see how they cope with the idea that being alive in a treacherous world is the fundamental pre-existing condition.
I surely don’t know if the nation can afford to pay for what this law requires, but then can we really afford to pay for anything? — including the salaries, retirement benefits, and health insurance of congressmen, not to mention two wars, bailout life support for banks, rising unemployment benefits, shovel-ready stimulus projects, et cetera, blah blah? Probably not.
My guess is that the health care “industry” will unravel in the years ahead under the weight of its own hypercomplexity just as all the other hypercomplex systems of normal American life (such as it is) groan and collapse under their own unworkable immensities — and I speak here of industrial-style farming, Big Box “consumerism,” Happy Motoring, too-big-to-fail finance, centralized public education, and the pension racket. All the activities of daily life in this country have poor prospects for continuing in their current form.
At least this once a workable majority in the government has stood up to the forces of cruelty and injustice, and whatever else happens to us in the course of this long emergency, it will be a good thing if the party of fairness and justice identifies its adversaries for what they are: not “partners in governing,” or any such academical-therapeutic bullshit, but enemies of every generous impulse in the national character.
I hope that Mr. Obama’s party can carry this message clearly into the electoral battles ahead, painting the Republican opposition for what it is: a gang of hypocritical, pietistic sadists, seeking pleasure in the suffering of others while pretending to be Christians, devoid of sympathy, empathy, or any inclination to simple human kindness, constant breakers of the Golden Rule, enemies of the common good. In fact, the current edition of the Republican party has achieved something really memorable in the annals of collective bad intentions: they have managed to create a sense of the public interest whose main goal is the destruction of the public interest.
This is exactly what the Republican majority on the Supreme Court did earlier this year by deciding that corporations — which are sociopathic by definition in being answerable only to their shareholders and nothing else — should enjoy the same full privileges in election campaign contributions as human persons, who are assumed to have obligations, duties, and responsibilities to the common good (and therefore to the public interest). This shameful act by the court majority only underscores the chief defining characteristic of Republicans in their current incarnation: an inability to think. And so, naturally Republicans gravitate toward superstition and the traditional devices of improvident religious authorities — persecution of the weak, torture, denial of due process, and dogmas designed to spread hatred.
I hope the American public begins to understand this, because they have been manipulated in their own pain and hardship by these dark forces, and their thrall to the likes of John Boehner, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Rush, Hannity, and the rest of these vicious morons could easily increase as their economic hardships deepen. We’re facing a comprehensive contraction of wealth and economy that is going to challenge every shared virtue in our national soul, and we’re not going to meet these difficulties successfully without a sense of mutual obligation and sympathy for each other. The Republican party is just itching to turn a giant thumbscrew on the US public — that is, before they try to start burning their enemies at the stake. We understand that the Health Care Reform Act is a first stand against that.
Well said!
Skip,
Kunstler is a piece of FOD. Why is the only thing that doesn’t keep him up at night is government intervention in healthcare?
If he spoke up in the wardroom you would have thrown something at him, why do you put up with him now?
Because its 14 years later and I have changed since then. Besides his central point in the first and last paragraphs are correct-the Republicans have behaved disgustingly. By allying themselves with other pieces of FOD, namely Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and the tea baggers. They are so damned concerned about appeasing their own lunatics that they have abandoned the principles that once made them great.
They are no longer the party of Reagan-they are the party of demagogues and I hate them for it.
We know this law is wrong for America but you and others seem to be trying to convince yourselves that it is not.
BTW, I was against medicare prescription, Just another carrot on a string to keep the masses walking down a path to…..
I don’t know any such thing. I know America needs to fix it’s health care system. The people who are trying to convince themselves are the people who are sputtering opposition to trying to do that. Other nations make it work so can we-if we just were to get serious about it-and stop spouting lies about how its Ok to screw over people.
I agree, but to justify this bill on account of not liking Beck, Palin and crew is nuts. Serious people have been proposing changes for healthcare that make improvements without destroying the system.
Go talk to any group of doctors who see patients and they can list a dozen things we can do tomorrow that will radically improve the system. You know them already, decouple insurance from your job, allow plans to compete across state lines, repeal state mandates that force coverage on politician’s pet projects, huge reform of tort law, etc.
The problem is not the market, but government interference distorting the market. Also it is fundamentally unconstitutional to force people to buy something. I do not have to buy a car or a house, but now some bureaucrat is going to tell me what type of insurance I have to buy and fine me if I don’t? This is government out of control.
I take grave exception to your idea of other nations making it work. They tolerate it because they have to. To get an insider’s view of the British Healthcare system, go to cityjournal.org and search for Theodore Dalrymple. His articles go back over years and do a wonderful job explaining the real system. It will not bring Beck and Palin closer to your heart, but it will eliminate the idea that other countries have this figured out.
What we needed was health insurance reform, my health care is fine. This bill will do nothing to check health care costs, which rise at 2-3 times the inflation rate every year. Further, most of the provisions do not go into effect until 2014. Further Further, it rewards insurance companies by forcing everyone to have insurance. The very insurance companies that are currently gouging our eyes out. The only good thing is the ending of pre-existing condition abuses.
I do agree that the GOP have behaved badly; fear, hate and obstruction are the bulwarks of repugnicans.
Skinny,
There are more examples than Britain. I would commend to you a book by TR Reid called The Healing of America. He examined health systems all over the world. It’s pretty startling. Japan, Switzerland , Singapore , all have universal access to health care insurance.
I do agree that there were a lot of fixes that could have been made- but the point is they wre not. The huge issue that none of your points address is how do you solve the probl of getting insurance for people with pre-existing conditions . Insurance companies could have solved that on their own but they did not. So now they will take a well deserved kick in the nuts.
I am still not sure how the insurance companies are going to take a hit. They are going to have 23 million new customers that have to buy their product, at pretty much whatever price they want to charge. If that is a kick in the nuts, I’ll take two please.
I’d submit their cash flow will be less positive. There big thing is that they like to drive investments-and not pay off policies to the maximum extent possible. Thus they are able to pay the sums they do for things that have nothing to do with insurance-like AIG did.
Wow Skippy! I’ll agree that somebody is nuts. You can read that Kunstler over the top crap and not gag? I submit that thrift is a virtue. Shouting at victim to put his hands in the air while pointing a gun at him while your accomplice empties the victim’s pockets isn’t much of a virtue.
How about I go and do my thing which harms nobody and you go and do your thing which seems to be all about stealing from others? Don’t go all moral on me or I’ll just ask you where you draw your moral little line in the sand. Are you going to insist that it is our moral and ethical duty to provide universal health care and a decent standard of living to everybody in the world? If you can’t justify that how can you quibble? It’s a moral duty isn’t it?
This calls to mind; “May 24, 1945, just 16 days after V-E Day,
Britain’s socialists were sanguine. A Labour Party firebrand, Aneurin Bevan, anticipating the Labour victory that occurred five weeks later, said privation would be a thing of the past because essentials would soon be abundant: “This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the same time.”
Conservatives don’t oppose the health care destruction bill because they hate people or lack moral fiber. They oppose it because they know that it is unaffordable. As shown in Medicaire, Medicaid, Hawaii and MA. It doesn’t take a genius to see that. It isn’t about hate.
As I have said before-if we can afford a 1 trillion dollar war for worthless Arabs, we can afford this bill.
It is about hate, it is about not being stupid. The health care system needs fixing. People need to be able to get coverage-ALL people need to get coverage.
And yes there is a moral duty to provide a threshold standard of living for our own citizenry. When insurance companies move billions through the markets every day-and AIG can pay obscene bonuses to their people-the money is out there to make this work.
Conservatives do hate people-that is clear to me after reading all the comments in various places.
I see you view it as a coverage problem. I view it as a service provided issue. In my view, very nearly everybody in American receives medical care. In your view 30 million are without insurance. In my view those 30 million receive medical care.
So your problem is that we need insurance reform. Well why not say so rather than all these baseless claims that the medical care industry is broken?
That is what I have said-as well as saying that anyone who thinks forcing people to get care in an ER is the preferred way to do business definitely has a problem perceiving what the issues are. That approach makes your coverage more expensive and impacts the quality of your care when you go to the ER. Just ask my son-who is a paramedic.