Facebook is an interesting animal. It allows you to trade opinions with people in slightly less-than real time. For the most part I find this to be a good thing. It gives you the chance to process, to think, and to then respond. This is, as I just said, a good thing. .... For the most part anyway. There are however, times when there is no way to respond to positions so separated from reality, that there is no longer any point in trying to have a reasoned discussion of whatever the particular issue is. Health Care Reform is such an issue.
I have friends with whom I disagree with on the issue of Health Care Reform. They are reasoned, intelligent, logical even compassionate people in nearly all other areas of their lives. Yet on this particular issue, they are so utterly, completely and unbelievably wrong, as to boggle the mind.
Tomorrow the President of the United States, will meet with , and seek common ground with, people who are irrationally committed to preventing any meaningful change in how health care is accessed and paid for in this country. First, before I tell you what is on my mind? As preface, I would ask you take just few moments and hear about one family's perspective on Health Care coverage in the United States.
To my friends who disagree with me on this issue. I love you . I love you even more we disagree on things. Your opposing perspectives make me the better, the smarter and the wiser for having had the debate. Yet on this issue, more than any other, I have had enough.. You are wrong. You are not just wrong, you are inconceivably, wildly and unbelievably wrong. Your opposition to a public option and any serious reform of the for-profit health insurance industry calls into question your basic human nature.
And I am done arguing with you about this. If you are unable to grasp the very basic concept that the need for a civil society to act in defense of the lives and health of its own people, MUST outweigh the lust for profit. Then you are saying that in the United States of America in 2010, you feel dying because you are poor and cannot afford medical care, is dying from a justifiable natural cause.
If you continue to claim that "the free market can provide" in the face nearly a century of indisputable evidence to the contrary. You are demonstrating a lack of even a basic understanding of the concepts of free market capitalism you claim to champion. Captialism 101 - what determines price in a free market? Supply and Demand. The demand for health care will always infinitely outpace the supply. Left only to market forces the costs of health care will never go down, only increase. To claim deregulation of insurance companies will lead to greater competition and more options is to demonstrate such willful ignorance of the economic realites of the costs of health care today, that I can't take you seriously.
If you cannot see the need for a public role, a public option a public hand in the defense of the lives of our citizens in the United States in 2010, then you are pro-death. You are saying the death of over 40,000 Americans each year because they cannot afford health care is just fine with you . You have placed yourself on the side of Economic Darwinism, and believe in survival of the richest.
In overall life expectancy of a child born in 2009, Canada ranks 7th in the world, the United States ranks 49th. The public health care system in Canada may not be a workable solution for our country. But to seriously argue that it isn't vastly more effective in overall outcomes compared to what we currently have in the United States, just makes you look incredibly stupid. If you seriously are pointing to a news story about a Canadian politician traveling to Miami for heart surgery as evidence of the failure of single payer health care, you may as well be protesting outside NASA with signs saying the Earth cannot possibly be round because from where you are standing on the ground it looks flat.
It is my deepest hope, that you find in your core being the understanding that this is not an issue of opposing perspectives on public policy. This is not about right and left. This is about right and wrong. This is about who we are as a nation, as a society and yes, as a species.
And to President Obama, enough is also enough. The Republicans are wholly and competely owned by the for profit insurance lobby. They will never vote for anything you propose, they can't. The GOP has boxed itself in with a rabidly nonsensical base that will never tolerate any sort of cooperation with you on ANYTHING. So I urge you to follow my example. You need to say to your Republican friends what I am saying to mine.
There no longer is any point to having this debate with them. they are wrong. Trying to explain this any more is, what my Uncle Dale would describe as; " Like trying to teach a pig to juggle. In the end it just frustrates you, and annoys the pig."
America can no longer wait. Get this done, and get it done now. The debate is over.
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