Random Health Care Reform Crap in my Tabs

Here’s another rundown of the random crap that’s started to accumulate in my Firefox tabs, to do with the American health care war being waged presently between people who want people to have access to health care, and people who want to continue denying access to health care in order to make a profit.

Lou Dobbs took a tour of other countries’ Single Payer systems and was shocked to discover they were neither crap nor socialism. (Then he went on a rant about illegal immigrants, I bet.)

Mike Haubrich has two great essays up at TUIB, one about the propensity to defend “free market” health care at the cost of even people’s lives, and the very real burden on the economy that private and employer-based insurance entails. As always, Mike is impassioned, eloquent, and absolutely correct.

Thom Hartman has an idea: let all Americans buy into Medicare. Since Medicare works, why not just expand it, instead of a whole new system? Though I’m of the belief that this reform would not go far enough to remedy the health-care-for-profit setup that the free market has saddled you with, one must not let the perfect become the enemy of the good. It would be a start, and certainly a hell of a lot less government-expanding. The only problem would be the refrain of “where will you get the money?”

To which I answer, try actually taxing people on more than their first $90,000 dollars in the social security tax cap. Yes, the rich pay higher taxes already, but guess what? They only pay that higher tax on the first tiny sliver of their multimillion dollar incomes! Plus, the capital gains tax was lowered from 20% for the higher tax brackets down to 15% in 2003, and look what happened to the economy. Lower income significantly, AND increase spending by a trillion dollars on a needless war? Gee, let’s ask Paulson or some other Bush crony what they think might happen! The Teabaggers who complain about this idea would see absolutely no increase in their own taxation rates, as they are by no stretch of the imagination rich enough to qualify for these higher taxes. This smacks of “eat the rich”, but honestly, how many millions do you need? Can’t you spare a bit of your walking-around, pocket-change, latte-money as part of your social contract with the country that provided you the opportunity to GET rich?

Greg Laden’s noticed a trend, at the same time: the deathers, the birthers, the teabaggers and the people who conflate Obama with Hitler are incredibly endemically racist, and are using their favorite conspiracies to cover up this fact about themselves. People who sidestep the issue of race are no better, as they are tacitly allowing the retardery to perpetuate.

Retardery like this woman comparing access to health care with Naziism, earnestly, at a town hall meeting with Barney Frank. And Frank dismantles her, then without missing a beat handles the rest of the crowd with aplomb. What a guy. Greg also covered this, with a shorter clip of the video.

And the astroturf has finally gotten so blatant that even Fox News is forced to report on it. And critically, at that! Wonders never cease.

Finally, in an attempt to tie together all the astroturf campaigns, the birthers/deathers/teabaggers/etc., Buzzflash explains how much of The South really feels about the resolution of the civil war — in their hearts, the South never really conceded, so the racists have driven their beliefs underground using coded messages. John Edwards was right — there are two Americas.

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Random Health Care Reform Crap in my Tabs
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2 thoughts on “Random Health Care Reform Crap in my Tabs

  1. 1

    “Eloquent?” Is that Canadian for “articulate?” I mean as in, “That’s Mike’s not such a hoser for an American. He’s eloquent, eh?”

    Seriously, thanks for the mentions.

  2. 2

    And so clean-cut, you’re like a dream blogger.

    What? No, no, I’m not being country-ist, just stating facts about Mike the American — I mean, the human being.

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