46 million people aren’t being completely fucked over. They aren’t even being partially fucked over. In fact, most don’t need health care at all at the present time. And of those who do, most don’t need urgent or expensive care. So that leaves a small percentage of the overall population who truly is in need of help, and my contention is that we’d all be much better served to come up with some sort of program to assist those few people rather turning the whole system upside down for the sake of those few people and putting all our health care in the hands of a government that we all know produces inferior results.
But to tell the truth I think this concern over the uninsured is largely a smokescreen just like insurance company malfeasance is largely a smokescreen. Solutions exist to deal with both of these problems but anytime someone brings one up they fall on deaf ears. This is because, once again, the real goal is political and it’s name is socialized medicine. You guys will condemn any and all ills that result under a free-market system and then, as has been demonstrated quite clearly in both these threads, you’ll excuse, rationalize or handwave away even greater ones provided they happen under a system of socialized care.
What we really need to be doing in this country is asking ourselves whether we want the government running our lives or not, because ultimately that is what liberalism really wants. It wants to create a world where everything is “fair”, where nobody has it better than anybody else and nobody has more than anybody else. And while that sounds all well and good, a couple of major problems exist in trying to acheive it. Number one, “fairness” is impossible to create in the first place. Fairness has never existed and it never will. Attempts to manufacture it only create other types of unfairness - and artificial, unnecessary ones at that.
Life was pretty fair for the inhabitants of the Soviet Union and communist China, but how happy were their lives? Life under forced fairness was bleak, oppressive and hopeless. What little that people had was cheap and of inferior quality, long lines existed for simple staples, and people were forced to buy and eat whatever the government in its wisdom decided should be grown and made available. And of course, government being government, errors in that decision making process were common, with the result being unexpected overages of some foods and shortages of others which resulted in such things as people having to eat bananas for three months because the government had produced too many of them and while having to stand in line for hours to get their allotment of bread due to a grain shortage.
And then we have the fact that so far as we’ve ever been able to determine, the only way that entirely socialistic governments can remain in power is through spying on and oppressing their populace. This is because the lack of individual freedom so characteristic of collectivist governments is utterly contrary to human nature and people will rebel against it if given the chance. And so criticism of government cannot be tolerated, with spying and police-state oppression being the result.
No, the fact of the matter is that life is unfair and shit happens. Conservatives believe that this fact should be recognized and that people should do the best they can to build lives in which they can better contend with the visissitudes of life when they happen, and in the event they can’t…well, that’s just life. And conservatives fall prey to the very same illnesses and accidents and troubles in life that happen to everyone else. We just don’t think it’s everyone else’s responsiblity to do something about it. And this is because we know that the individual freedom that goes along with living for ourselves and taking our own chances is vastly preferable to the oppression, privation and lack of personal freedom that is the inevitable result of creating a government whose purpose is to make things “fair”.