So tired.

[velvetpage]

Naturally, I was too worked up to sleep well last night. Figures.

I'm so very tired of the "socialized medicine will force you to see doctors you don't want to see, have procedures you don't choose, and force you to die when the government says you should" rhetoric. (That's almost a direct quote from a friend of a friend, but I've seen it in a dozen other places.) It looks to me like people who are primed to dislike the plans for reform that are being floated are also primed to see options in the plan(s) as requirements. So, elderly people being given access to counselors to plan living wills = health care workers deciding when Granny will die, and circumcision being encouraged (which I haven't seen anywhere, actually - I'm wondering if it's a mishmash of two separate items recently in the news) = babies being taken away from their parents to be circ'ed without parental consent. Oh, the inability to renew plans that don't meet the new minimum standards is in there, too - "We'll all be forced onto the government plan because they won't let us renew the old plans!" It's all misinformation and scare tactics, combined with a healthy dose of, "I'm a conservative and NOTHING that is generally labeled Socialist is going to happen on my watch!"

Time to get this day underway if I'm going to be ready for the meeting by 9:30.

Comments

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

The debate in the US is not about healthcare at all. Healthcare is a proxy for something deeper going on in this country. The US is not a nation the way France, Germany, Japan, China or most any other nation is. Maybe some of the African nations or the nations formerly known as Yugoslavia have the same issues as we do, but I doubt it. The United States has no coast to coast ethnic identity. There are a patchwork of ethnic identities that are regional and there is also a cosmopolitan/rural/exurban split going on as well. It has been said that Americans(the US variety) are extremely patriotic in that we love our country but hate our government. I disagree with this assertion because I've lived in so many parts of the US. Nationalism here is based on an ideal rooted in one's regional and class identity. One tends to project that identity outwards ignoring the facts on the ground, namely the regional and other demographic differences. One assumes that America is like their own little neighborhood except for those places that are UnAmerican. Those places shift depending on who you are, but you intensely distrust and dislike those places because they are foreign or somehow infiltrated by outsiders who implicitly undeserving and morally suspect. If this were all about simple policy issues such as funding, we'd have had this national healthcare system back in the 1970s. However, the big problem with taxes, especially since Reagan is the perception that one's taxes go to outsiders who agendas that are inimical to one's own group, the True Americans. So when the ultimate outsiders, the politicians in DC start talking about changing the way things work in your community in way that really affects you, fear and distrust takes over, hence the propaganda and the lies. This all buries the real debate which should be over costs and revenues.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I think the concept of "common ethnic identity" is somewhat problematic in other countries that claim to have one, too - witness the way France has repressed its minority native languages, like Langue d'Oc, Breton, Alsatian, Nicois, Basque - none of them have any standing or national funding and they're dying because the nation pretends to an ethnic identity that it has created on the backs of the victors in wars going back to Charlemagne. And every other European state has the exact same problem - nation-states did not rise out of ethnic groupings nearly as much as they'd like to believe they did.

However, you're absolutely right about where the mistrust comes in. The lady I was debating with yesterday kept giving slogans from right-wing propaganda as though they were fact - socialized medicare isn't "The American Way," socialism at all isn't "The American Way," the plan is going to "take away our freedoms" (specifically, the freedoms to buy plans that encourage people to ignore preventative measures in favour of saving money - she didn't actually answer my assertion that losing those particular freedoms would save her money and make her healthier) and several other phrases that served only one purpose: derail the debate about how to fix the health care system using fear, misinformation, and emotional catch-phrases. She even pulled out the one where people who don't like it can move to Canada, which I pointed out was derailing the democratic process exactly the way she was accusing them of doing. She pretty much shrugged and kept doing it.

It was a very frustrating thread and I'm glad I let it die.