Archive for August, 2009
Health Care Propaganda
Posted by Benjamin J. Thompson | Filed under Liberty
I keep seeing the most offensive propaganda in the news these days, centering around the “debate” on health care reform.
Senators and Congressmen are getting excoriated at their own town hall meetings by voters who don’t want the bill to pass (they represent a growing majority: only 25% strongly favor, while 41% strongly oppose, and 68% are quite content with what they have now). This is great news for voter involvement. They’re finally mad about something. What is not great news is the reaction it’s getting on TV. I was willing to dismiss this as the usual Pravda-style coverage we’re treated to on the cable news channels, but last night I saw the exact same words spouting from that 20-something news anchor on our local channel out of Notre Dame, WNDU. If it wasn’t before, it is certainly now pervasive. Something along the lines of “Congressmen are interested in having discussions about the reform bill, but their constituents insist on screaming and shouting instead.” I can’t think of anything more Brazil-esque than seeing a bureaucrat wish his people would just calm down and be civil about his hostile takeover.
I keep hearing that this resistance is populated by “birthers,” by “9/11 truthers,” that they carry swastikas, that they don’t understand the issue, and that they’re only here because they hate having a black president. Politicians and pundits have compared the town hall meetings to “Klan rallies.” They’re a noisy, selfish, racist, religious-fundamentalist, conspiracy-theorist, hate-soaked rabble.
Or maybe they’ve read the bill and don’t like it!
The pushers of this “reform” bill dove for cover behind the “racism!” wall so fast it should be obvious that it’s an attempt at manipulation. The voters elected a black president. Both by electoral votes and by popular vote. That the people have misgivings about nationalizing the medical industry has nothing to do with the color of a guy’s skin. If the KKK is the only group politically active enough to show up at these town hall meetings, then we’ve got much bigger problems.
Has the Left completely forgotten how its protesters against the Iraq invasion were treated in 2002? “Anti-American,” “terrorist sympathizers,” blah blah blah? This, when the whole freaking PLANET was protesting against it? Or what about the litany of “sore losers” in 2001 and “sour grapes” in 2005? Is our memory this short?
We’ve got an intensely partisan media, and the party it supports is entrenched power. Our health care “system” is broken. That much is true. But believe it or not, there are solutions to these problems that don’t include getting government into the health insurance business. All it takes is asking how the system got this sick, and repairing that damage. Creating a new multi-billion-dollar program to alleviate symptoms is never a fix. If your car breaks down, you don’t fix the situation by towing it everywhere.
Plenty of reputable guys in business and politics have written about this and not only can they explain why this bill is a bad idea, but they can offer different ideas, ideas that are way cheaper to implement than what’s getting debated right now. As long as our politicians are experimenting on our problems like a kid with a chemistry set, can they please try the cheaper experiments first?