BlackPerspective.net
Discussing the Diaspora as seen through an internal Black lens
How The Healthcare Debate Is Poisoned By Both The Left & The Right Fringes, Pt 1
August 22nd, 2009
A couple of weeks ago I did a post that ended with the following comment regarding healthcare policy ideology:
“…free healthcare means Yobachi pays more than the 4,500 to 5,000 dollars a year in income taxes he’s already paying and gets nothing out it; while bums who don’t work sit on their ass and collect checks.”
And I stand by that statement as nothing is free (the first rule of economics) somebody pays for it. So the use of free is a ridiculous misnomer. Here’s that post in full
I got a ruckus uproar in response when I posted it on a message board, from the usual far left elite/everybody’s a victim/unending taxation is the answer to every problem crowd.
As is the norm there was no room for discussion on the point I was making, or even on the actual words that I’d typed; but instead my character was simply assailed, I was put into an ideological box that doesn’t apply to me based on this false left-right dichotomy, views that I didn’t express were claimed to be mine (even when they contradicted what I explicitly did say), and my concerns about my own financial well being were ignored.
Hell, the fact that I dared to express concern for being able to live off the money that I make rather than have it increasingly stripped from me at my own peril, some how makes me a bad guy.
And so goes the healthcare debate, and the problem with it.
There was one salient voice; and I don’t purport that this commenter agrees with me per say, but I agree with what she had to say; highlighting most of my problems with this whole debate that is hijacked by the anti-healthcare mobs on the far right, and the blind taxation-government is god assassins on the far left.
jsl32 wrote:
healthcare has infinite demand.
it is not so super in, say, canada, if you don’t live in toronto or vancouver. the medical treatment i need cannot even be procured anywhere in canada or most of western europe– i would have to get it in the usa anyhow.
the point being, the american hodgepodge sucks, but other countries are smaller, have less ethnic diversity (and hey, they STILL have racist medical practices and horrible dismissal of complaints of POC [people of color] just like the usa) and their costs are also increasing because healthcare can be demanded infinitely, but people can’t pay more than 100% tax to fund it. there are also limits on how much a government can borrow to fund it, as well.
i don’t believe other, whiter, smaller, more population-concentrated-in-a-few-cities countries are doing it better in a way that will scale to our less white, 300 million plus, less-population-dense and more spread out country. but i do think there is something to be learned in studying where each alternate system has weaknesses and seeing if that can be corrected in actual health care reform.
i hate the healthcare discussion because it operates on the notion that other countries are uniformly better and have zero flaws and anyone mentioning a shortcoming is an evil rethuglican who wants to run over infants in an SUV.
but it hardly matters. congress is simply not competent to give us useful reform, so whatever happens will be worse and even more people will be sick.
it is worth noting that women, especially WOC, are both more likely to get chronic ailments and get poor care for them, even in other countries. depending on the chronic ailment, america is actually your best bet for treatment for the kind of insidious pains that women disproportionately get.
i wish i had the faith in congress so many seem to have that this set of laws will somehow not have ridiculous consequences and will work out grandly for all americans.
because making the government the only payer will not make doctors give better care to POC or working-class people of any race. it will not necessarily make doctors stop imposing coercive and invasive surgical and medical procedures on women disproportionately. there are systemic issues that aren’t going to be fixed just because who signs the check is different.
in any case, we’ll see in ten years or maybe five what healthcare looks like in america and all those other countries because aging populations should start really crippling budgets around then even more than is already happening (yes, those other countries are also having trouble paying for their alternate systems– which means there is no current system that isn’t facing funding issues real soon now.)
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Yobachi Boswell is creator and publisher of BlackPerspecitve.net. I’m a writer, activist and political watcher based in Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve also been know to do some spoken word and MCing in my day.
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About 10 years ago my Aunt was told she had breast cancer after getting a free mammogram thru the mobile unit in San Diego CA.
She worked all her life but didn’t have Health Insurance but knew there was free help out there because a friend had received free treatment and care for her breast cancer about 7 years earlier and was a survivor. When we tried to get these services she had doors closed in her face over and over again, we were sure this was race related and were pissed . We finely learned the real story from help we got from a very nice lady in the non profit healthcare clinic. She shared with us that because of the overwhelming amount of people here now illegally using these services they have had to make huge cuts and close programs, so they were no longer able to offer the services they use to. She helped my aunt get thru the system but she still ended up dying and to this day I believe if she had been able to access the healthcare we already had in place (stolen from her and others from illegals) she would still be alive.
We already have Healthcare safety-nets in place that have been overwhelmed by non-citizens causing American families in need to be cut off and programs closed to save money. First make cuts to the non-citizens so American citizens can again use these services. I will not support any bill that does not clearly excluded illegal immigrants. I think that it is a shame that we require Hospitals to treat the non emergency medical needs of non-citizens causing over 60 hospitals to close their doors in California in the last ten years and none opening to replace them. The Healthcare reform being proposed WILL have to be rationed at some point as has Medi-cal, Healthy Families, the services of the Health Department, etc. Californian’s are already paying for programs we can’t access because of people here illegally and coming over the border monthly for free treatment and medication. What will be the outcome when we give unlimited access as most of the undocumented will fall into the free medical government heath insurance part of this plan.
Thanks Kim for your comment, that’s an interesting perspective. I’ll add studying the illegal immigrant drain on non-emergency resources as part of my developing study of healthcare.
[...] to hear about co-opts or anything else; and that’s exactly the problem. This demonstrates what I posted about the fringes on both sides poisoning the public debate around [...]
[...] noted in piece entitled How The Healthcare Debate Is Poisoned By Both The Left & The Right Fringes, Pt 1 (that was always meant to lay the foundation fort his one); I and the quote I used noted the whole [...]
[...] How The Healthcare Debate Is Poisoned By Both The Left & The Right Fringes, Part 1 [...]