Obama's Health Care Overhaul: Your Opinions

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by key

As far as I can see the biggest concern to Casey is that her taxes will go up.

At the risk of going all "meta" on everyone here, I think that there's actually another issue that really comprises the elephant in the room. So I'm going to name it (I will call it George, and I will hug it and squeeze it and call it George! Sorry couldn't help myself). The question isn't about taxes, it's about *merit*. Even more than I heard Casey concerns about her taxes, I heard her concerns about lazy people (undeserving) who don't want to work (not meriting help). That was the theme that I kept reading in different words. And it's a question I think is actually at the heart of our current debates about social programs.

I'm willing to bet that Casey does *not* include wounded veterans in her list of lazy people who don't want to work. (I may be wrong here.) I'm willing to bet that she believes that they ARE deserving of medical care and help going to school. This is a position I don't disagree with. The problem seems to be who 'deserves' help. I (and it seems many others) believe that there are people who fall on hard times and what they need from society is a hand back up to their feet. Some of us may have been born into hard times. Some of us may have fallen on hard times one or more times in our youth or later. My position is that despite the fact that there will be people who game the system, we should be a society that has a safety net and the social contract should be like this: "if you cannot do for yourself because you are disabled, we will do for you. If you can do for yourself, but you have fallen on hard times, we will do what it takes to help you get back on your feet. If you were born into hard times, we will not hold you responsible for the circumstances of your birth and we will help you get into a position so your children won't be born into hard times. For that, we expect you to do your best, obey the laws, maybe do something nice for your neighbors once in a while and generally try to leave the place a little cleaner than you found it when you got here."

Others would disagree with that social contract. I don't know precisely what they would replace it with but, for reasons I'll get into later, I think that the harsher we decide society should be the more short-sighted we are being as a culture.

I want to digress about this whole 'rugged individualism' ethic. While on the surface it's admirable, a couple of people (Jess for one) has pointed to the downside of this. Yes, if one *can* do for oneself one should try their best to do so. However, kids in the mix changes the calculus on that one for me. Think about it this way: Which is more admirable? The mother who has a sick child who *refuses* to take that child to the hospital because "I've never taken a thing from anyone" and she has neither the insurance or the cash to pay or the mother who swallows her pride and goes to the hospital and gets her child medical care even if it means having to ask for charity. I would say that latter. Now, that might be self-serving because that mother was me some 20 years ago. My son was two, I was just out of the Army (not by choice), my marriage had just fallen apart and the only job skills I had were what I'd learned at McDonald's and cryptography. I grew up in privilege, believe that sitting on the doorstep of the county welfare office, my son in my lap, waiting for those doors to open, was the most humbling experience of my life. But I *HAD* to. My parents had cut me off, I had no job skills and my ex-husband had less skills than I did and couldn't hold a job to boot! It was humble myself or watch my kid starve. To this day, I still maintain that watching him starve would've been the easier path at the time, I would have had my pride intact.

Back to the issue of merit. Here's why I think having a truly harsh society is against ALL our interests. As long as I could get welfare, food stamps and medicaid I had no reason to steal or turn to other forms of crime. There was an *option* so I never really had to face my son starving--maybe sometimes there was less food, maybe sometimes I went a couple or three days without eating to make things stretch, but I didn't have to turn to stealing bread from the grocery store so my son could eat. But I can well imagine what I might have been driven to had there been no options. And that is the short-sightedness that mystifies me. One, to me obvious, lesson of history is this: as long as people can feed their children, put a roof over their head, give them some kind of bed to sleep in, some clothes on their backs and some shoes on their feet, they are very, very unlikely to revolt. But when people are watching their children starve or die from malnutrition or disease that *could* be cured but they cannot get the cure, they *will* revolt. It seems to me that social welfare in all its forms, is an insurance policy society pays to keep the wolves of temptation to revolution outside the door. It strikes me as short-sighted to not see a lesson that so obviously litters the fields of history (French revolution end-stage Weimer Germany, Zimbabwe at the end of the last century, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and on and on.)

Originally Posted by Corkey

When someone refuses to speak to facts, and only comes at the debate with emotion, then it isn't a debate, it is in fact manipulative and childish. Now did I use any words that were so over the head that they cannot be understood? No. Fact: if one makes over $250 K a year their taxes will go up. Fact: if one makes less than $250 K a year they will go down.
The rest of her argument was lost in emotion.
So while banging heads on a wall and "talking to a rock" which btw weren't exactly used, may seem harsh, they are in fact exactly what is happening.
MY .02

I have to say I so agree with this. At some point you have to have your human reaction and just holler! One of the problems we have right now, as a society, is that we are in the grips of a meme that makes dialog difficult. That meme is that 'facts' are just a synonym for 'opinion'. It's not. Everyone has a right to their own opinions but no one has a right to their own facts. If someone refuses to acknowledge that there's one set of facts about he world, it really DOES feel like talking to a rock.