America's Number One Sucker Confronts Health Care Reform

The Rugged Individualist--America's Number One Sucker--cheers when needy people are deprived of food, battered women are deprived of protection from brutal husbands, children are deprived of education, etc., because this is "getting government off our backs." He's particularly interested in getting government off the backs of corporations who spend billions on lobbyists seeking favors from that same government, the costs of which are passed on to the Rugged Individualist consumer.

While their primary focus is anti-government, these Republican and Libertarian freeloaders are perfectly happy to drive on government-built roads and over government-built bridges, and call a policeman or fireman when they need him, or cash a social security check, or hike in a National or State Park, or take advantage of the thousand and one other services governments provide. They just don't want to pay for all this 'bureaucracy.' (Oddly enough, these 'anti-government' advocates are curiously silent when it comes to the largest, most corrupt, and most wasteful bureaucracy on the planet: the Pentagon. They have an almost worshipful attitude toward an arms industry that can't even lay claim to being a capitalistic enterprise, since it doesn't compete on the open market but is assigned contracts with an automatic 10% profit built into them.)

Every nation in the West except ours has a viable, national health care system that covers everyone, yet at the mere mention of the possibility of retrieving American medicine from its corporate swindlers, it only takes some Goebbels-like demagogue to start gabbling 'socialized medicine' to send the Rugged Individualist scurrying under his bed in terror.

Medicare spends 3% of its funds on overhead. Insurance companies spend as much as 30%. And where does that money go? To exorbitant executive salaries, of course. But most of it goes to maintain a large staff of folks whose main function is to avoid paying for your health care. The Employee of the Month is the one who saves the company the most money--by denying your claim, finding a 'preexisting condition', raising your premium, or canceling your policy. John McCain argues against a public option because he knows the insurance companies can't compete!

In other words, the Rugged Individualists are willing to pay more to have people cheat them out of what they're paying for.

The Individualist has forgotten the first rule of power: 'Divide and Conquer.' He's divided himself from the rest of society. And he's been conquered.

(In his inauguration speech, Obama talked of a whole new way of doing things. To understand the cultural paradigm shift that engendered this change--the shift that both the American Right Wing and the Taliban have resisted so fiercely, see my website for information on The Chrysalis Effect: The Metamorphosis of Global Culture.)

Comments

[VocalVet]

Let's see, the top 20% (vastly republican) pay 80% of the countries taxes - Yeah, they certainly are the freeloaders. But keep believing whatever it is you believe if it makes you feel better.

[Skepticat]

Even back in the early 1950's when the maximum tax rates were 90% - I would have still been very surprised if the richest 20% payed 80% of the taxes. After 30 years of tax cuts they have been paying substantially less. Any credible figures to back up your claim?

[VocalVet]

2006 Share of Individual Income Tax Liabilities - Top quintile (20%) paid - 86.3% of it

Available at the CBO - http://www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/tax/2009/all_tables.pdf
Page 4 bottom

(even if you divide the income among the household, you won't get it below 70%)

[propitiousmoment]

Yeah, but they control what, 95% of the wealth? We ought to pay taxes proportionate to that, not income. Then there would be no sales tax for the lowest income levels, either.

[VocalVet]

So if you and I make the same money, you squander your money partying, and I save my money for the future: You will tax my savings (networth) yearly, until I am thoroughly punished for doing so.

That makes a lot of sense.

[JNarragansett]

I am constantly confronted with this fallacy that if you do not support a government run health plan, then you must oppose all government programs in order to maintain consistency. By that same logic, would someone who proposes that we need a single payer health system be inconsistent for opposing government involvement in any aspect of life? Of course not, that's and this is a false choice on either side. A reasonable discussion of our liabilities, the costs of going forward, the need for reform, and how that reform should be implemented can happen. Perpetuating misconceptions on libertarians (that they support no bid contracts and anything that comes out of the pentagon) and republicans in general only serves to drive people further apart.

[TRex86]

Well said. I assume that you are Libertarian. Don't tarnish yourself hanging out with the Republican Party. Their latest tactics like "death panels," constitute demagoguery so reprehensible that it confirms the belief that they are not going to collaborate in good faith on any program the Democrats propose. On matters like health care they have no answers, no solutions, no policy. On national defense, contrary to the stereotyping, they are a disaster. Individuals in the Republican Party need to tell their leadership to dial it down. The party needs to become a Libertarian Party and lose its desire to look in my bedroom and read my emails.

[JNarragansett]

Thanks for the compliment (I probably should have read it over for grammar). I am libertarian (small l) in thought, but shamefully utilitarian in action when it comes to politics. I come down equally hard on both sides for distorting the issues. In that spirit I'll agree that "death panels" was hyperbolic and disingenuous, but reducing the Palin wsj op-ed to an iteration of the "death panel" rhetorical attack ignores her reference to Mr. Cannon over at the CATO institute and some real plans for reform. There are a number of conservatives who do have a real interest in individual liberty and a head on our shoulders, and I would rather we take the reins of the GOP than concede it to those that you describe. So I'll ignore your advice to stay away and continue my work to point them in the right direction.

[TRex86]

History lesson: The Nixon Adminstration's "best" idea to control health care spending was for profit HMO's. They were fed some dubious assumptions based on the experience of Kaiser-Permanente (a non profit entity) and decided to promote for profit HMO's in which the organizing concept is "the less you do the more you make." As this idea evolved many non profit insurance companies converted to for profit companies (eg, Wellpoint) and raked in the dough. Of course for a decade we've known that this dumb idea has failed to achieve its primary mission, to hold down spending. It has perverted the professional culture of medicine. One HMO in Los Angeles on a monthly basis fires the physician that spends the most on patients. I'll take "government run health care" any day over Wall Street health care.

[MAUIMONKEY]

You are so right. American conservatives are the world's biggest suckers. You can sell them anything, literally, if you put ads on Fox. They will willingly buy into stuff that kills them, like having more guns in your house. "I have a higher chance of being shot by my husband/wife/kids, higher chance of my gun being used by my kid to commit suicide or homicide, and higher chance of an intruder shooting me with my own gun, but what the hell, the democrats hate it, so it must be right." I try to think of them as dinosaurs, stuck in the tar pit, wailing as they sink down into extinction. Isn't that some kind of natural selection?

[SageFire]

Yes, it is as if they think the roads, bridges, electricity, just grew out of the dirt.