The blog of the weekly Modus Operandi Podcast. Alan Miller and Dr. David Overbey are fairly intelligent men who get together once a week and talk about stuff 'n' things, for you. Lots of politics and culture, a bit of sports, Dave's cats. It's time to hang out with the ogres!
A recent Kaiser Family Foundation poll shows some interesting things about Americans' opinions about the health care reform bill. It came in as the fourth most important reason people were voting (at 17%) but when you break it down into against some/all or for some/all people seem to come up about 50/50 with a slight advantage to the against side. But if you dig in just a little bit about this there's really only one thing people are totally opposed to: the individual mandate to purchase health insurance.
The KFF's charts pack (.pdf format) is a really interesting study of the health care issue's impact on the last election and of American's opinions on it. Well worth studying the entire poll and the questions asked, if you're the kind of person that like to know what he/she is talking about. I know this will not affect our conservative friends as they will have stopped reading at the first line above that opposes their world view.
"I look around and I see Sen. Bob Bennett, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, eosinophilic and megakaryoblastic leukemia, and Sen. Pat Roberts, and I think, 'This is what the Republican Party is all about,'" Sen. McConnell said. "We don't like this new bill. We don't like that it will cut the national deficit by $1.3 trillion over the next 20 years. We don't like that it's now illegal for insurance companies to suddenly drop a parent for getting deathly ill. That's why we're so very proud to be working with leukemia."
Just to bring you up to date, at a recent gathering of the lunatic right (i.e. the Republican non-ultramega "base") to protest health care reform the crowd chanted "nigger" at Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) as he went from building to building and an elderly man shouted, "Barney, you faggot" at Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) to laughter from the rest of the crowd. Civilized Americans would be appalled at this behavior (which I believe reveals more about the true reason for teabagger anger than any bills in Congress) but Republicans' reaction to it can be summed up in muted at best or completely nutjob like Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) who blamed it on (wait for it) the Democrats and their "totalitarian tactics" like majority rule by our elected representatives.
"When you use totalitarian tactics, people begin to act crazy. And I think, y'know there's people that have every right to say what they want. If they want to smear someone they can do it. It's not appropriate. and I think I would stop short of characterizing the 20,000 people who were protesting that all of them were doing that."
It must be fun living through the looking glass where everything is the opposite of reality. A universe where this utterly flawed reform bill contains "Death Panels," forces us to euthanize Grandma, eliminates Medicare (a program the Republicans suddenly want to protect fiercely after trying to kill it since it was first suggested), and will put America so deeply in debt we won't be able to keep the lights on (as opposed to the huge savings the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) says it will deliver over the course of the next decade. A universe where fascism and communism are the same thing. A universe where a parliamentary procedure they used to ram through Bush's tax cuts which have nearly bankrupted the country (and when added to the price tag for his insane foreign wars they may very well have bankrupted us, we just haven't filed for Chapter 11 yet) is suddenly "exotic" and like nothing that has ever been done before in history.
When the revolution comes I want to be one of the ones lining these SOBs up against the wall. They've destroyed this country and will not stop until slavery and indentured servitude is the most common state of the lower classes. If you vote Republican, FUCK YOU.
Dave doesn't agree with me that there is a large slice of Americans that listen to the authority figures they have been taught to believe which explains why the Republicans can lie about health reform in every aspect and their followers will believe them. When you ask Americans about each individual aspect of the healthcare bills now before Congress they agree with all of them, but when you ask them what they think about reform they are marginally against it. I blame the liars and Dave blames those that listen to the lies.
Whenever I've managed to draw out a "conservative" on health care I always say to them, "So you believe a poor person should die early, slowly, and painfully?" That is the end result of profit driven healthcare: around half of people will be priced out of healthcare eventually so they will not be able to afford regular checkups, etc. and so they will die early, they will experience a lot of pain, and their death will have been preventable. And on top of that they will be bankrupted during the process of dying unnecessarily so their children will inherit nothing and therefore will most likely remain in poverty. Thanks Republicans. Thank you right in the ass.
