For my 500th post (yes, an auspicious post it is!) I’m going to reprint a piece of ignorance and vitriol I was involved with on Facebook, with the follow up comment I made. Some people seem to go out of their way to find fault with Obama, and his favored policies. They really have latched onto Obamacare with a certain amount of irrationality that bespeaks some un-articulated motivation. I can think of nothing that would cause such nonsense other than pure and simple bigotry.
The favorite word bandied about these days seems to be “hatred”. “Don’t feed the haters”, they say, and “why do you hate Obama so much?” I’m not talking about people on the right exclusively. I’m including myself and people like me. We all do it. I don’t think hatred is a good word to describe the irrationality that comes out of these people. Hatred is a perfectly normal human emotion, and it’s necessary to human growth and potential to hate things. Notice I said “things”? I hate asparagus. I hate to see abuse of children and animals. I hate rape, and murder, and …well, you get the idea. Do I hate the abuser? The rapist? The murderer? The asparagus vendor? No. I pity them, I try to understand them, but the consequence of their mental attitudes, actions and lack of empathy, I hate.
See? We should never hate any fellow human. We can hate what they do, but not them. The religious have a term for it which they use to rationalize their own bigotry (Hate the sin, love the sinner), so be careful how you use your hatred. It’s really easy to take your hatred from a book, itself full of hate, and without thinking actually use it to hate the presumed sinner.
Anyway, on to the article and my response:
OBAMACARE – LIES LIES LIES ABOUND UNDER THIS PRESIDENT
[note: the entire link is not quoted. Mr. Novelist only copied the part that sustained his argument, but left out the rest, which tended to balance out the article. S.I.]
On Sept. 12, 2008, Obama Pledged (LIED) to a a crowd in Dover, New Hampshire:
“I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan, no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increases; not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains taxes, not any of your taxes.”SO HE CREATED A BRAND NEW ONE – OBAMACARE!America, Take a look at how you’ve been screwed!WASHINGTON (AP) — Nearly 6 million Americans — significantly more than first estimated— will face a tax penalty under President Barack Obama’s health overhaul for not getting insurance, congressional analysts said Wednesday. Most would be in the middle class.The new estimate amounts to an inconvenient fact for the administration, a reminder of what critics see as broken promises.
The numbers from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office are 50 percent higher than a previous projection by the same office in 2010, shortly after the law passed. The earlier estimate found 4 million people would be affected in 2016, when the penalty is fully in effect.That’s still only a sliver of the population, given that more than 150 million people currently are covered by employer plans. Nonetheless, in his first campaign for the White House, Obama pledged not to raise taxes on individuals making less than $200,000 a year and couples making less than $250,000.
And the budget office analysis found that nearly 80 percent of those who’ll face the penalty would be making up to or less than five times the federal poverty level. Currently that would work out to $55,850 or less for an individual and $115,250 or less for a family of four.Average penalty: about $1,200 in 2016.
And my pithy response. (Note the FB post was put up by some guy calling himself Steven Clark Bradley Novelist).
Conceptually, I’d have no problem with what Mr. Steven Novelist advocates (other than the underlying hatred for Obama that seems to motivate him). He should not be forced to pay a penalty, or buy health insurance if he chooses. But first the legislatures, both state and federal, would have to change some laws.
For instance, they would have to stop requiring hospitals to advance emergency medical services to anyone that doesn’t have insurance. I don’t want my premiums to reflect medical care for people with no more than two or three brain cells who refuse to plan for their own medical emergencies.
Next, the tort laws would have to be changed, so that someone who is clearly in need of medical attention, but is dumped on the street for lack of insurance, cannot sue the people who dump them there, such as the doctors, nurses, EMS personnel, police and firemen. Since a lot of tort law is based on common law, there would have to be specific and nationwide immunity laws enacted everywhere.
Finally, those who refuse to have medical insurance should be obliged to wear a patch on their clothes, and have stickers on their houses, cars and places of business indicating their lack of medical insurance, so that medical care providers don’t inadvertently provide medical care because of lack of knowledge of that fact. I know this might stigmatize them, as Jews were stigmatized in the Warsaw Ghetto after 1939 with their yellow stars, but hey, that’s the price of freedom, right?
After all that’s in place, then Obamacare can be amended to remove the requirement Mr. Novelist objects to.
I think it’s obvious that people who have objections such as this to Obamacare, have not really thought things through to their logical conclusions. Having not done so, they insist that Obamacare is wicked, a tax ( breaking an unfulfilled promise), and a scourge on America, when in fact there is really no downside to having universal health care (as short of that mark as Obamacare actually comes).
That being the case, the underlying motivations of people like Mr. Novelist are clearly rooted in bigotry and hatred ignorance.
SPANISH INQUISITOR 
The Asparagus Defense League would like to have a word with you… asap.
Given the amount of incivility (hatred, bigtory, ignorance -willful and otherwise -, and just plain stupidity) that exists in the country today, especially in the pixelosphere, maybe it’s best to follow the dictum, “Don’t reason with people who can’t reason”. We can hurl facts and evidence and proofs at them, but the operative word is hurl, as in fling, as in slap-in-the-face, as in throw, but to try to have, or expect to have a reasoned argument, in the critical thinking sense of argument, well, fahgeddaboutit.
Now, about your slur against asparagus…
$1 for every time that happens in the US about any topic and we could pay for everyone’s healthcare.
Does any–anybody at all, with the possible exception of billionaires–actually pay all their own hospital expenses? Even most rich people pay into Blue Cross or something. But if they incur a half-million-dollar hospital bill, have they paid anything like a half million dollars into the plan? Not likely! The fact is, expensive medical treatment is almost always paid for, at least in large part, by “somebody else.” (And most of us will need it eventually.) So let’s dispense with this complaint about having to cover for slackers. Basically nobody is footing their own bill for major medical treatment anyway. The issue, then, isn’t whether we’re going to pay for everybody’s hospitalization, but how we’re going to collect and manage the monies to do it.
One of the programs I use costs $4000. There’s no guarantee when that program will get upgraded, but if I pay $500/yr I get that upgrade if it comes out during that year, otherwise I may be looking at paying $4000 again. If one doesn’t come out, I’m out $500. If one does, I’ve come out ahead but in no Bizzarro-world am I ever thinking “somebody else” paid the extra $3500 for me. That’s just silly. I freely entered into a contract, essentially software insurance.
Health insurance is the same way. I’m paying a relatively small fee every year compared to the crazy a$$ amount it could cost if I needed serious healthcare but rest assured I’M PAYING. “Somebody else” isn’t paying. I pay X/yr to get Y. What many are upset over is helping to cover those who can’t or won’t do the same thing. That’s the problem, and your “somebody else” argument fails to address that fundamental problem.
The real root here is compassion or basic human empathy. We should, as a society, accept that under no circumstances should anyone have to go without basic healthcare. Sadly, that’s a hard sale so the next best option is SI’s approach to appeal to their own selfishness by pointing out how not covering the uncovered will come back to fuck them over.
Healthcare should be a basic right just like you’d expect a military to defend you, firemen to save your house, police to protect you, public schools to educate you and courts to provide justice. These are foundations of society and as such, we should all have to pay for their maintenance. Of course as Americans we want to feel special and have what’s better than “somebody else” and that’s fine. We do that, right? We pay taxes for police yet may also pay for personal security options. We pay taxes for public schools but some pay further to put their kids in private schools. Likewise, we’d have the option to pay for the high end private insurance. I don’t see how having a public healthcare system should be any different then any other fundamental service of the government.
My point wasn’t that we don’t pay some of it. My point was that when it comes to major medical costs–and all of us incur them eventually if we live long enough–practically nobody pays all of it themselves. To pay for it requires that somebody else pitch in.
And that’s why I’m going the same place as you are. The objection you hear is that with public healthcare a lot of people will be getting something they haven’t paid for. Well, like I said, when it comes to major medical costs practically everybody is getting something they haven’t paid for. So that objection simply won’t fly. The system as it is now doesn’t ensure that only the “deserving” get health care, because so much of the cost of that care is not borne by the individual receiving it anyway. The system, as it stands, only ensures that certain people get better care for what they haven’t paid for than others do for what they haven’t paid for. Let’s clear the table and start over. If one of our founding principles is that everyone has the “right to life,” we should be doing everything humanly possible to keep them living.
Just like I paid for my software, those who pay their monthly premiums feel they’ve paid for their medical so I don’t see your argument working for them. The cost of healthcare is artificially inflated anyway, partially due to insurance companies themselves. It’s not really a tangible thing, which further muddies the situation and reinforces the idea that when you pay whatever it is you pay each month, you’ve paid for it. Lastly, those who have paid for years without any incident and then finally need it feel they’ve already paid in full.
The conservative “right to life” belief is strictly limited to the initial acquisition of life. Anything regarding the quality or maintenance of that life they don’t care about unless you’re doing something with that life that they don’t care for, like loving someone of the “wrong” gender.
Your style is so unique compared to other people I’ve read stuff from. Thank you for posting when you’ve got the opportunity, Guess I will just book mark this blog.