Except there are a large group of people who currently cannot afford health care coverage because of pre-existing conditions. If you think that someone who has made no mistakes in their life other than getting cancer should go bankrupt you’re the evil one.
If you are against pre-existing conditions barring people from getting health care you need a mandate, otherwise the prices for everyone would go through the roof. If you need a mandate you have to offer subsidies for the poor. It’s a fact of life. This is basically the Senate bill. It addresses the fact that millions cannot get Health Insurance, no matter the cost.
As I said, you are advocating millions, upon millions of people be excluded from Health Insurance because they got sick. Are you similarly of the opinion that millions upon millions of Americans should not be able to buy food (just as necessary as health care) because of how they were born?
Your motives aren’t good. They are based on the essential arrogance that you got where you are because of hard work, and everyone who isn’t where you are is lazier than you.
The fact is you got where you are because the federal government created a society where someone of middling intelligence and a law degree can make a good income. You owe more to this society than a welfare mother. She makes 15k a year for sitting on her ass. You make much more because there is a stable, (usually) thriving economy that makes your profession highly compensated. I and my wife are also the beneficiaries of this society. Everyone is. And if you don’t think that millions of people should have the right to purchase Health Insurance for less than 10 times the cost you pay for it, you don’t understand how much you’re sucking at the teat yourself.
Once again, the definition precludes any other result.
Here’s a hypo: what if Congress said: for the good of the country, we will identify by aptitude scores the men and women who will be the best medical providers, and we will require them to enter that field, with fixed wages that will let them lives reasonably well, but not very well, because after all, it’s unfair to profit from someone else’s misfortune. And that’s just a sacrifice that they will make for the good of society.
I assume (I hope) that you would see the horror in that kind of a solution, right?
So it’s possible to be opposed to a solution that would drive down health care costs and increase the number of people that can get care, for reasons that the solution is damaging in other ways to society - yes?
Since this discussion arose around the question about whether the Left or the Right is more vicious in their attacks on each other, I believe I will bow out of this thread now, and leave its readers to decide that question based on the various examples offered above.
I don’t think wrongly but sincerely believing you are acting in your country’s best interest is a Get Out of Jail Free card in the judgment of evil stakes. (Cf. Godwin and a whole damn host of tyrants and dictators.)
I know I need to be specific when talking to a nitpicking asshole.
It’s not evil to raise taxes. Just as it isn’t automatically good to lower them. Bush did a great evil by lowering taxes on the richest Americans. He caused horrifying deficits for no good reason. The level of taxes people pay is a matter of opinion. You want less, but presumably don’t have a list of budget cuts that are realistic to pay for those. I want more, because going back to the Clinton years doesn’t seem to be a bad way to go. On this neither of us is evil.
However, you want millions of Americans to be unable to buy health care. You don’t care that for them, it is as natural as food. Would you support a law that said Hispanics had to pay 10 times as much for water? How is that ethically different than saying that People with Pre-Existing Conditions have to pay 10 times as much (If it is even possible for them to buy it, some are simply denied the ability to pay at any cost) for life-saving health care.
Can’t you see that your opinion makes you a festering lump of evil-shit?
I’ve defined thinking that people who are as real and as valuable as you should have the same ability to have life saving treatments without losing everything they have worked for their whole lives, as evil. You’re just not a good and decent person, and it’s you unthinking ideology that makes it so.
There are people in politics I have simple policy disagreements with - my opposition to them goes no further than this. This was not the case with Ted Kennedy, though. There were aspects of his conduct over the years that caused me to oppose him on more vehement grounds. These were matters like the vicious character attack on Robert Bork, made at a time when his own personal conduct was questionable, especially toward women and around alcohol.
The characterization of Chappaquiddick as a simple car accident is a pretty sanitized account of the event - the fact is that Kennedy left the scene of the accident and did not notify police until the next morning, after consulting with advisers and lawyers. Whether Mary Jo Kopecne could have been saved is entirely incidental to this fact.
Now, there are some things to understand here - heading into the 2000s I no longer cared enough about the Bork matter and the other things to make an issue of them - especially considering that as political issues they were quite dead. Senator Kennedy had made laudable efforts to reform his personal conduct. I still opposed much of his political platform, but that was fine. On the couple of occasions when we met, we were friendly - easy since he was always friendly and he didn’t know me from Adam.
I wouldn’t want to stack those other issues against what other politicians did. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t want to weigh my reaction to them against how others reacted - right or left wing. A politician builds his career on trust and credibility and issues - lose them and his job is gone. A liberal Ted Kennedy held his seat forever through many personal issues. With him gone voters rejected pretty overwhelmingly his liberal successor.
So we can quibble in this thread about how Kennedy was or wasn’t a lout, or Cheney was or wasn’t a war criminal. We can argue the good and bad points of both men. I don’t think it matters much - the history books will take care of it. The voters will as well.
We can choose, though, whether we want to act like jerks. What line won’t you cross. And keep in mind that it might be your comment someone else picks on - making you “the face” of your side.
As bad as I can be here sometimes, I won’t cheer over someone’s death. That doesn’t seem all that hard to do, but you wouldn’t know it reading what some people write.
Paying a slightly higher level of tax isn’t anything like enforced labor camps. The correct level of tax is an opinion. People will differ.
And raising the tax rate on the very, very richest Americans isn’t overly damaging to society and is certainly less damaging than 33 million people not having insurance.
If you act like a vile, unthinking piece of garbage, people will get snippy at you.
Here is the essential intellectual laziness of friend Bricker. He is awfully opinionated, until you ask him to substantiate those opinions. Then he bravely runs away.
Is paying for the military an unfair sacrifice for society? Is paying for the CIA and FBI an unfair sacrifice for society? Is paying to maintain the interstate highways an unfair sacrifice for society? Affordable health care is an important issue for every American and is, dare I say it, a necessity. We don’t have that now. We’d like to. But we can’t even have a reasonable debate about the form such reform would take because we’re not up against differing opinions on reform, we’re against differing (and intractable) opinions about government itself, the majority of which are illogical, untenable, or completely divorced from reality. Your own hypothetical illuminates where you’re coming from, this bizarre fear of some Orwellian world where the government is going to hamstring and enslave society’s high flyers. And what exactly would make health care reform so damaging to society? Is it because the government is actually doing something that helps society? Do you want us to just break up into 50 colonies or something?
But as it stands, we won’t be singling anyone out, because Congress’s plan seems to be requiring everyone to eat the shit sandwich of mandated insurance purchases from the private sector rather than providing a public option, even though we provide one for everyone over 65. So at least we’ve got that going for us.
You see, that is opinion. One I happen to agree with, but opinion none the less. And that is where you made a major mistake, IMHO, in including opposition to Health Care Reform as one of your list of “sins” of the right.
It’s perfectly possible to sincerely believe that Health Care Reform in general will make life worse for the country in aggregate. It’s not a view I hold, but I can see where the people are coming from. It’s even more possible to conclude in all sincerity that the effects of the half-assed, half-baked, half-thought out compromise options being suggested will be overall negative for the country. Thinking that doesn’t make someone evil, it makes them wrong. Now if the person is thinking - I don’t want health care reform because it will mean I have to pay slightly more for my stellar private insurance, or because I might have to wait a while for my minor operation, and I don’t give a shit about 30 million uninsured - then I would call that evil. But to think that Health Care Reform, especially as proposed in the US, will have net negative effects isn’t so far out there as to warrant the evil tag.
It’s not only a misrepresentation of the truth, on a tactical level its also one of the classic reasons the American left is bloody incapable of getting anything done.
I would of course grant that HCR may honestly be debatable. But the Republican HC Plan (heh) doesn’t do anything about Pre-Existing Conditions. So it doesn’t address the greatest evil in the system. Which is what I was getting at with the evil. I know opinions can differ, but the Repubs are specifically against fixing the problem.
I honestly think the reason the left can’t get anything done is that they are unwilling to outright lie, ala deathpanels, killing grandma, birthers, government takeover, etc. etc.
And what I figure is going on is that the left (me included) cannot wrap our heads around the notion that a somewhat universal health care system is evil and that opposition to it on that ground that it is evil isn’t simply a way to avoid a wealthy society’s health care responsibility to everyone, including the less fortunate and that this should be related to profit motives. I can certainly understand why some people think that insisting on a profit motive for health care and letting poorer people go without care must have an evil motive.
The government has no right to tax the entire population without its consent. The left is trying to include health care for the masses that are taxed as a condition of granting that consent. We can do it for roads, farm programs, debt service and military purposes, and we want to extend that consent to requiring health care for everyone that is taxed because that is what wealthy modern societies all over the world do for their taxed sovereign. Every single government official and employee has this benefit at the expense of the taxpayers. We consider it evil that the elected officials blocking this benefit for the people feel free to take it for themselves in a luxury version.
Is it possible that there are government officials/employees who oppose this for the people who pay for it for them are sincere in their opposition? I suppose it might be. But if so, its a subject that they dodge.
Well there are those of us who think that any system short of Free at Point of Use isn’t an effective reform. And who also think that trying to get the market system to do something about the problem of pre-existing conditions is using a tool singularly poorly designed for such a job. “Please, go out there, make money of sick people, just don’t make money of really sick people.” It’s illogical and probably doomed to failure.
But supporting one of the half ass compromise proposals doesn’t make you evil. Just arguably wrong.
And no, I don’t think it is unwillingness to lie that stops the left getting anything done. Part of it is the belief that if only the right stopped lying then we would win. And along with that is the sense of entitlement that has convinced the left it no longer needs to fight, no longer needs to get out there and convince people, and no longer needs to be relevant and involved in people’s day to day lives.
There is a difference between being wrong and being evil. As someone said earlier almost every single policy of the Republicans is not merely wrong, but evil.
Oppression of women? Evil.
Oppression of minorities? Evil.
Wars of aggression and greed? Evil.
Theft and larceny from the poor? Evil.
There’s not one part of their policy that isn’t about hurting other people for their own benefit. And if you aid and abet evil, you are guilty of evil yourself. People like Bricker make monsters like Cheney possible. May they all get what they deserve.
