Health Care Reform: White Like Me, Oh, Dear!
I have to say it's really embarrassing to be a white person these days. Talk about behaving badly. Who would have ever thought that nice white people from Missouri and Pennsylvania could get so riled up about the Weimar Republic, say, or the Founding Fathers? Especially when the topic at hand has nothing to do with Germany or the Revolutionary War.
At her town hall meeting in St. Louis, Sen. Claire McCaskill seemed genuinely hurt when the mob (I mean crowd) shouted "We don't trust you!" She tried to shame them into quieting down but they were so loud they couldn't hear her. Senator McCaskill, unlike her Show-Me-State constituents, is so polite she practically apologized in interviews later for inciting a riot.
I can't remember now which town hall it was, but a lot of the screaming white males were quite overweight. (I could have said fat, but my mother told me it's not nice to call people names even if they're yelling at you.) Did you notice that, too? I kept thinking it's a good thing the topic is health care because if one of these angry men has a heart attack there's probably a doctor in the crowd.
But seriously. If we're going to talk about health care, they should really consider cutting their carb intake.
All this brutish behavior. It's enough to make me renounce my European roots and claim my tiny Chickasaw heritage.
Granted, the whole discussion around health care is complicated. Which we could have easily solved if we'd just adopted a single-payer system, rather than confuse people with plans that call for government control and socialism. (Oh, we didn't? Never mind.)
But does that really call for gangs of white, white-haired people to scream at members of Congress? Or to liken our hard-working representatives to Nazis? (And please, pretty please, can we stop with the unpleasant and inaccurate historical references?) Or for a certain white female ex-governor who quit her job and seems to have a problem discerning rumor from reality to assert that seniors are going to be facing death panels?
I think not.
Plus, now I'm worried that my 85-year-old mother-in-law thinks I plan to kill her. And the teenagers are imploring us every night with cries of "don't kill grandma!" and "don't pull the plug!" Thanks, Sarah Palin!
What plug? Can we have a reality check here? Their grandmother lifts weights, doesn't drink or smoke, and gave up sweets to lower her blood pressure. I don't know where the kids get this nonsense. Unless they were listening to Charles Grassley.
Earlier this week the senior Iowa senator told a group of elderly white folks that they had every reason to fear some government bureaucrat putting them down as a way to cut costs.
Clearly, we're in trouble when one of the key senators in health care reform is this out of touch with the proposals. Or so desperate to get re-elected that he has no qualms about terrifying his elderly constituents.
As if that weren't enough, yesterday Grassley announced that he and a few other senators had eliminated any provisions in their plan that would have provided the chronically ill with a say in their care. Now people won't have to be tortured by listening to their doctors blather on about hospice care and living wills. Unlike Europe and Canada, where patients also have to wait months to see a doctor if they're sick or need glasses or dental care.
Oh, wait, that would be here.
This week thousands of people lined up outside the Forum in Los Angeles -- some arriving at midnight -- for a free health clinic being run by Remote Area Medical, a nonprofit group in Tennessee. Most were from poor and working-class neighborhoods around the Lakers' former home. The first day alone 1,500 patients were seen. But the need was so great that 500 others had to come back the next morning.
It was like that all week. Long waits. Families camped out in their cars so their kids could get their teeth cleaned or their eyes checked. In contrast to the angry white folks repeatedly acting out on TV, no one screamed. No one shook their fists or shoved anyone or had to be escorted out by police. No one mentioned "death panels."
Just crowds of grateful people that they were finally getting the health care they need.
Or as Lourie Alexander, who cleans houses for a living, told the New York Times: "What I liked about it was that everyone was so sweet. You know when you haven't seen a doctor in so many years you have a lot of questions."
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Correction for previous post. I meant to say, I have seen several faces...
We ought to be ashamed.
Here's what I think- and posted at www.proofo
As pointed ut by Mona Gable on Huffingtion Post, white people are going to meetings and behaving badly. From comparing our elected representative with Nazis for things they haven’t even suggested, much less done, to having the lack of self awareness to not realize the irony of showing up to scream down a health care discussion while obese, a certain set of people are showing us just how to stop things from happening. Things like an earnest and honest discussion, or a full exploration of alternatives.
Fortunately I am so conditioned by advertising and my time in the last century to know that those are ‘my people’ even though I can certainly see white in my hair. I know that I’m not like them because I haven’t tried to shout down anyone since my kids got out of preschool and I gave up being a referee for AYSO.
The whole health care ‘debate’ is a sorry excuse for public discourse much less democracy. What’s happening in Iraq looks more honest and authentic Where are all those smart young ground troops that helped elect Obama now? It looks like the party in power put the freshman team on the field and they’re getting their butts kicked by the other sides sympathy alumni (didn’t even attend or graduate) pickup squad.
more at www.proofo
At least you can claim Chickasaw! This white woman is disgusted, embarassed, and ashamed of the stupid, racist white people "protesting" at these Town Halls.
Can't WAIT to be a minority. Time for the bottom rung to be on top, to paraphrase a black Civil War soldier fighting for the north who ran into his former master in with a bunch of other reb prisoners.
Great post! Nice to see that some whites acknowledge what is so clearly evident. You and the author make a very good point (her first paragraph pulled me into this article), and its good to see . . . very good.
Many of us are so very tired of the partisan BS regarding Health Care Reform! Because that is exactly what it is!!! In the meantime, the job is just not getting done!!!
Let's keep their feet to the fire! Let's keep up the pressure on these officials that we elected...
Please sign this petition to have paid health care removed from our representatives in Congress until such time as they reform health care - to include a strong public option - for 'we the people' who they are supposed to represent. Then spread the word to anyone and everyone you know!
http://www
Miss Gable, please do not diminish the concerns of these people, nor belittle them because of their poor choices. There are plenty of reasons, most of them having to do with the preservation of human rights, for opposing any single-payer system. You will find some of them in "No, Congressman, 'Healthcare' is not Spelled 'P-O-L-I-T-I-C-S,'" at politguard
Also, bear in mind that the very notion that heritage has anything to do with character is a throwback to a time when racism was a matter of course. It is a dated and dangerous mentality.
-Chris Henderson
I agree with your premiss, but these people need to give their reasons. So far all we hear are regurgitated lies, inuendo, and plain stupid speeches. If they give a reason they will be listened to.
I agree that most have not equipped themselves to give reasons, and that is why I consider town halls to be generally unfair, unproductive publicity stunts. Even our representatives fail to ask the questions concerning basic human rights. Poor Mr. Dobbs tried to get a straight answer as to whether or not healthcare actually is a right, as opposed to something we might like to be a right, and the folks he had on never came to the question, let alone attempted to answer. The bar of education in political science must be raised before the town hall becomes a viable forum again.
-Chris Henderson
These folks do have concerns, caused by their belief that no President, particularly an African American one, is actually capable of acting in their best interests. They are also projecting because of residual guilt over the cruelty that was done to African Americans for the last several centuries.
There's a lot to overcome there, and it seems Obama is taking them seriously and trying to answer their concerns.
I can only ask if it is anything like Jackson and Sharpton's doubts as to whether or not our president was "black enough" to act in their best interests, or Sotomayor's concerns that it would take a Latina to act in the best interests of the Hispanic community? Racism, historically speaking, is not just a "white" disease (using the vernacular of some racists).
By the way, do you think there are African tribes feeling such racial guilt (I don't believe in Jung's psychoanalysis, so I wouldn't know) for selling their fellow Africans into slavery, not just to Europeans, but to other African tribes? It is time we looked beyond the incidental manifestation of racism in America and discovered it as a broader phenomenon requiring a more comprehensive approach.
-Chris Henderson
Do you feel that Canada, France and Great Britain have not preserved human rights for their citizens due to their medical systems?
No, but I must stress that it is only incidentally a matter of what I feel. In fact, it is a matter of what human rights really are. My healthcare post on poltiguard
Human rights are laws made in accordance with the fact of metaphysical property. These include a person's inextricable right to their own work, which follows from their bodies and effort being a metaphysical property. Can it, therefore, ever be "right" for a government to demand, especially as if by virtue of human rights, the work of any one person for the sake of any other person? It is not charity, because charity is a beautiful act of giving freely and without compulsion. By nature, and again by virtue of the fact of metaphysical property, charity can't be done for anyone by anyone else. Therefore, government is not even capable of charity.
I hope this helps clarify my position.
-Chris Henderson
Citizen,
Please explain how and/or why many of these people believe a single-payer system would destroy their human rights? I've heard that statement before but don't understand how it applies to health care?
And, I'm not trying to be sarcastic. I really want to know...
I rarely take anything as sarcasm, creolechild. It is conversationally unproductive. Please, call me Chris. "Citizen" puts me in the mind of France's less-than-civil revolution.
The simple argument is that it is a violation of human rights to ask anyone to work against themselves in an economy. A single-payer system requires that the government pay a certain portion of premiums. This money is to come from taxes. Imagine yourself a doctor or the owner of an insurance company. You pay your taxes into a progressive taxation system, not to mention the myriad of taxes your business might pay (property tax, fuel tax, etc.). After all of this "giving back," a single-payer system means that a certain portion of the money you are paid for your services was yours to begin with. On an individual level, this is a politically philosophical argument concerning your right to compensation for your service, but on an industrial level it will cripple healthcare on real economic terms. A single-payer system amounts to the healthcare industry paying itself from its own coffers for the service it renders privileged clients after the money has been laundered through the federal taxation system. Boiled down to its most basic expression, single-payer systems are laws requiring people to accept less in compensation than their work is actually worth. The devaluation is merely shuffled behind the curtain of taxation.
continued below.....
Actually, it seems I must continue above....p
For a more cogent and less rushed expression of this position and its consequences, I wrote an article called "Krugman's Folly, Part III: Refutation of a Nobel Laureate in 500 Words or Less."
To be honest, though, most people haven't thought these things through. People argue all the time with little more than a half-baked idea to go on. That is why the first step is to help everyone in a discussion clarify their own position. This requires working to help your opponent get to the best expression of his own idea, the one you fear because it is most devastating to your own argument. What is going on now is either dismissal of the opposing view, or constant, broken-record enforcement of the administration's position. I think there are solutions here that violate no one's rights, but polticians need division in order to be viable, so none of them are looking. They think only far enough to solve the problem while firing up a precious voting bloc. After that, it gets too hard for them, despite how much we pay them.
I hope this makes at least one of the potential rights violations inherent in a single-payer system a bit clearer.
-Chris Henderson
Yeah, wouldn't it be nice if the angry mobs would read up a bit on the facts?
Mona, you mentioned several times in this post that the protesters of healthcare reform are "white". And the significance of that is what? If you had written about black people who were protesting some issue and were all worked up over it, and wrote about "screaming black males" or "angry black folks", your pointing out their blackness would sound racist. Are you implying that since Obama is black, the "whites" are only protesting healthcare reform because they want to bring him down? Or is it that whites are thinking: "I've got mine. I don't want my money being used to pay for the healthcare of THOSE people." It's time for people to stop using the race card.
I will believe that it's not about race when there are no more "Obama = White Slavery" signs proudly carried by these bigots, and when I stop hearing them say things like, "There's a black man in our White House" or "We want our country back."
A few racists don't represent the majority in those protest groups or what they're protesting.
In all honestly, I have seen a several faces...a very few faces...at some of these events that were non-white. (I'll try to find the links to the stories that were being covered.)
I think some people in attendance at these events are genuinely concerned about higher taxes; while others believe their Medicare and/or Medicaid is in jeopardy, and still others believe there is a conspiracy which would allow government to control their lives and make their medical decisions for them. Last but not least we have some very unenlightened folks who display their prejudices quite openly, and proudly, as evidenced by the signs which some carry.
Many people in attendance at these events are seeking answers to the questions they have about impending legislation, but are unable to do so because of the raucous crowds bent on preventing any type of discussion from taking place.
So, while I believe that there is some element of racism involved I don't believe it's across the board and applies to everyone present at those events.
Peace.
Thanks for adding some humor to the debate! When people take thing too seriously things get out of hand.(i.e religious zealots) But what annoys me the most about these protesters (including Palin) is they can't keep their metaphors straight or accurate. To call Obama a socialist (left wing) and a nazi (right wing) shows just how much Republicans have embraced anti-intel
The Nazi were the "National Socialist" basically in name only. The socialist and the Nazi's hated each other. And it was Hitler's populist views while drumming up anger that brought him to power. Populist such as Palin, Beck have the potential to be very dangerous.
If the shoe fits......
If you would like to help pressure Congress to pass single payer health care in a democratic and constructive way please join our voting bloc at:
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