Make America Sick Again

When Paul Ryan was a teen, he fell in love with Ayn Rand.  It appealed to his narcissism, as it did mine at that age.  The difference between us is that I grew up and recognized the reality of the world around me.  Paul Ryan still obsessively believes that if you got it, you deserve it.  And if you don't, it's your own fault.

That spunky can do attitude defies the reality of living in capitalist America, where if you got it, you get more, and if you don't, it has gotten increasingly less likely that you ever will.

But Ryan is surrounded by like-minded haves, and like so many of our current members of Congress, just doesn't have any patience with the whiners and the takers who think they deserve things like housing and health care.  To that end, he is determined to prove that what we all need is tough love, forcing us to choose whether we are going to survive.  That philosophy has been echoed "bigly" by our incoming moron-in-chief, who believes he made it on his own, by virtue of his big brain and not his wealthy father and Vladimir Putin.

Republicans in the House have been chomping at the bit to get rid of Obamacare, and since they have been back in session they have shown a greater work ethic than they have for some years.  They have detailed plans on how they can do away with the Affordable Care Act, in conjunction with the Senate and the Orange-Haired Idiot, who babbled at his press conference about how the bill would be repeal and replace, at the same time, maybe within a month, maybe within a week, maybe within the hour, maybe time traveling to 2010, you get the gist.

Way back in 2009, at the end of the last era in which Americans hung their hopes on an idiot with a clever and duplicitous campaign, the state of health care was shameful.  To the point where Keith Olbermann, on MSNBC, had been highlighting and fundraising for Free Health Care Clinics.  I recall my horror that so many were uninsured that -- in America -- they waited in hours-long lines to see a doctor.  That so many diseases that could have been easily treated were left to fester, so many people made sicker and even left to die out of the greed and neglect that the wealthy and the corporate powers exercised.

A couple of weeks ago, I heard some privileged cretin (a republican member of Congress) talk about how we were just spoiled by being able to get health care whenever we needed it, because we never had to face the cost.  He told the harrowing tale of his son falling and hurting his arm, and he and his wife deciding they would just ice the injury and wait a day to see if they needed to bring him to a doctor.  What a guy.

A guy who has never had to watch a loved one get sicker, hoping that the tide will turn and they will get well without the exorbitant costs of medical care.  A guy who is pretty damned out of touch with the extent of out of pocket costs involved with health care today.  A guy who could get really fine medical care the next day if he chooses to wait to get his son looked at.

For that matter, there is a myth regarding all of us great mass of unwashed Americans that says that we demand to see a doctor whenever we feel a windchill.  That we have nothing we would love to do more than wait in a waiting room at a doctor's office or a hospital, so we can suck up medical expenses.  That it is our self-indulgence, and not the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, the mismanagement of our hospitals, the fact that many of us are forced to wait until a common condition becomes an expensive medical emergency, that has caused health care costs to skyrocket.

And people like Paul Ryan have swallowed the lies and distortions in order to continue to live in the pockets of their corporate donors.

Meanwhile, as Ryan and the right wingnuts work to take away health care from millions of Americans, they continue to carry the best taxpayer funded health insurance the country has to offer.

So why not insist that members of Congress be forced to accept whatever plan they chisel out of their rigid dogmatic principles?  Of all of us, they can certainly better afford it.  It may be a challenge to their fact-free ideology, and it might be tough for them to be living in the trenches having to make some of the same decisions the rest of us live with on a daily basis.  But getting in touch with the unbearably high cost of private insurance just might convince them that the "r" word they are looking for is not "repeal" but "regulate."

If you have Obamacare, or insurance from the health care exchange, or from the Affordable Care Act, you may not know that they are all the same.  This was one of many of those sleights of hand that republicans managed to pull off, while Democrats thought getting the work done for the people would be enough.  I will assume that if you are reading my blog, you know these are all the same thing.  But there are an awful lot of people out there who do not.  And they will be tragically surprised to learn that the guys they voted for have taken away their health care.  Right now, one of our tasks is simply to spread the word that whatever they call it, they are going to lose their affordable health insurance.  Unless they speak up.  And those rate hikes that incredibly happened just before the election?  Democrats never let them know that it was a much smaller increase than we have seen before the ACA.  Ooops.

In fact, this could be a great time to let people know how much better and cheaper single payer health insurance would be.  If the Democrats would only.  Because as long as the republicans are offering "repeal and replace" the thing to do is to offer Americans a "replace" that would work.  Of course, it won't happen while the party of profit and destruction is running things, but if they heard some enthusiasm building up for a single payer plan, maybe backing off on the "repeal" wouldn't seem like such a bad idea.

A Cold-Blooded Debate

When I saw my PCCC ad against extending the social security retirement age on YouTube, I was dismayed at the first crazy mean-spirited comments.  Basically, a couple of idiots contended that I should stop whining and get a job, and that I was just lazy.  Amazing that they could even write, given their listening skills.

I knew, from my son's comments regarding a recent Rachel Maddow YouTube video, that there is a vast membership of idiots in YouTube; apparently the anonymity allows them to do the internet equivalent of crank phone calls.  What a riot, showing the world how stupid we are, they must think.  Let's publish really ugly things about people and then laugh like crazy.

I recalled that Maddow has a wonderful healthy attitude about all this, making wisecracks on her show, once saying something like she felt flattered that the insult involved her actual political philosophy and didn't involve calling her a man.

But then there was the Keith Olbermann interview with Jonathan Alter on Countdown.

It was amazing that I was there, not just on national television, but on Countdown, in the middle of an analysis of the battle to make changes to social security.  I have great respect for Alter, and in fact his comments regarding what Obama might say Tuesday night and why were thoughtful and made a great deal of sense, although I hate the politics that are controlling this discourse.

I was stunned, though, when he made it personal.  "That woman in the ad...she made it sound as if Lindsey Graham wanted to take away her social security."

Well, no I didn't.  I actually said, "...people like me just won't make it."

And in fact, whether it be next year (which the republicans dare not even propose) or in forty years (which they will), people like me will still exist, and will be in great pain when they retire, whether it be at age 62 (when when they wouldn't even be eligible to collect full benefits) or age 70.

Alter failed to hear the real argument, because he works up in the stratosphere where health care is plentiful and affordable, and you take taxis if you don't feel like walking, and when your job makes you tired, there is no one there making sure you punch in and out and take no more than your allotted 15 minute break.

One of the snarky comments either on YouTube or one of the online articles about the ad was that I should quit and go on disability (which, according to other snarky comments, would make me one of those people sucking the government tit, regardless of the tax dollars I put in to the disability fund).

As ugly as the comments of the anonymous internet cranksters are, I am far more offended by the personal tone to Alter's criticisms.

Because, you see, I know that Lindsey Graham is not going to take away my social security.  What he will do, however, is make my children pay by working longer for less.

Democrats Reframe!

I don't get why the voters don't get that the rich need to pay more taxes.  And that the wealthy shouldn't get to pass on their wealth to kids that haven't earned it.

I believe it really must speak to our indoctrination of what we believe America should be.  The land of the free means we get to keep what we got, which is why the charge of "socialism" is so heinous.

We can't seem to fight back by pointing out that people are dying from lack of or inadequate health care, or that people have lost their homes because they lost their jobs because corporations are buying cheap labor in third world countries.

Morality doesn't seem to have anything to do with this fight.

Whenever the republic party senses that they are losing a battle, they immediately sic their promotional/advertising powerhouses on the problem.  They have lots of them, and they are highly motivated to solve this problem, because the problem has everything to do with power and money, and this is what they do, and, as Mike Steele would say, how they roll.

We are always, always caught running behind in these fights.  Take the abortion battle.  We had to come up with pro-choice after the anti-abortionists framed the battle as being "pro-life" (which made us "anti-life").  Pro-choice just doesn't compare dynamically with pro-life.

And then there was the estate tax, which brought to mind, well, estates.  So it became the "death tax", which brings to mind images of the grim reaper taking your life savings along with your last breath.  And we haven't come up with a better way to advertise the estate tax.  If you talk to plain old ordinary people, i.e. voters, about this tax, they will probably refer to it as the "death tax", because it's just simpler than the phrase "estate tax".  We are all familiar with death, less so with estates.

So we have voters who are terrified of the national debt, and more terrified of taxation.  At this point, I don't think the republic party has come up with a catchy phrase for their side.  They are just repeating ad nauseum the threat that if taxed, the wealthy won't be able to give us jobs.  It is lame, and it doesn't have a catchy ring to it.

Now is the time to get our best and our brightest to work on this problem.  Ex republicans like David Brock and Arianna Huffington would be able to grasp the problem in an instant.  We need some private meetings in some smoke-free rooms.  And then we need to spread the word, the word being the bright new liberal catch-phrase for taxing the wealthy.  We need to make sure that everyone from Harry Reid to Keith Olbermann to Stephen Colbert to Ben Bernanke to Oprah has that phrase on their lips.  We need to make it a household word.

Because what we should have learned by now, is that it is not about the issue, it is about the packaging.