Yeah, but I have heard that opposition a lot while sitting in the waiting area of a VA hospitals. I’m surprised I haven’t hurt myself holding in the laughter at the irony of the spirited rejection of “socialized medicine” wherein a person’s healthcare is paid for by the government, while sitting in a facility that does provides just that.
I’ve heard that defense too, but, as @nungesser said above, I still find it to be just flat out ignorant. If this is the argument that one wishes to use, the surely the full concept of universal service from Starship Troopers must be available, correct? As I recall, if one wished to sign up for service, a position would be found regardless of circumstances. For some reason, the people that use that “it’s an earned thing” argument rarely want to follow the rest of that program, as apparently that’s even worse socialism somehow.
The VA is supposed to be the dehumanising bureacracy that humanized the cyborg killers of the HMOs. Thing is, the VA can be shamed. Congress and private health killers cannot. Not effectively. Why is that?
Because they have the Secretary of the VA to shame and fire? If shit goes wrong congress has that middle man to point to and demand a resignation letter, and thus the voters are happy Something Was Done by next election cycle.
His problem is that he’s a shitlord radicalized by military service. I was talking to another relative about health insurance, and how I buy mine on the exchanges and I’ve been happy with my plan. My cousin butts in to tell me government should be out of healthcare. I asked him if he felt that way while Medicare was picking up his mom’s hospice, he told me that she deserved that care because he had served, and that if my husband wanted medical care, he should be a self-made man in the way he was.
@RAvery - they’re already there. My mother couldn’t bear children, so I’m adopted. That side of the family refused to visit her in the hospital when she had to have her hysterectomy. It was awful for her - at that time, all women’s health was in maternity wards. So she was surrounded by women becoming mothers in a way she desperately wanted to, but never would. They spent their lives shaming her and my dad for “taking in someone else’s kid,” and wanted my dad to leave my mom to father “real kids.” It’s so ingrained that even my strongly pro-life cousins have sunk tens of thousands of dollars (and countless embryos …) into IVF to avoid the shame of having a kid like me.
Christmas was a bleak affair when I was growing up.
Are you kidding? The whole R plan is to get to the point where anyone who isn’t rich gets exactly what they’re given. What tweaks them is the idea that they have to give in order to get votes?
For some, it’s true. But it seems to me, the older I get, the more I find myself challenging the status quo and “the way it’s always been.” Or is that just developing crazier politics in a different direction (leftward)? >shrug<
Dunno. As a youth, I was a Québec-style Red Liberal, very federalist, very much behind socialised medicine, unemployment insurance, open immigration, etc…
I tend now to vote NDP, but my constellation of beliefs hasn’t changed much - the political landscape has, as nearly all parties have marched steadily rightward, at least economically. If I seem more radical, it’s because I’ve been around long enough to see that “the way it’s always been” is an active repudiation, starting about 40 years ago, of a political/economic direction that actually worked much better than its replacement. When you look very carefully at that repudiation, when you follow the money, you come to realise that it wasn’t designed to benefit the citizenry, and that the citizenry was quite deliberately fed a pile of steaming ideological bullshit and bogeymen to vote against their interests.
I think you can leave off the word “nearly”. I can’t think of one Western democracy that hasn’t been affected to at least some extent, not even in Scandinavia.
