Why the Republican objections and talking points are nonsense

[fpb]

One: there already are death panels in American health care provision. They are the accountants who decide how long the companies can afford to give healthcare to customers who have chronic or expensive conditions

Comments

[fpb]

Absolutely right. You know, if you were not married and a couple of continents away, I'd be in serious danger of falling for you. 8-)

Seriously, the plan as forced through Congress by the Democrats is insanely complex and has all the makings of a coming failure. But that is no reason to become hysterical about the principle of state-run health care. It took me about a hundred rounds of mutual insults before I could get superversive to understand that I am not scared of the State because we have in Italy a thing called Administrative Justice - a branch of the magistracy with equal dignity and power to civil and criminal justice - to which any citizen who is dissatisfied with State provision or performance can appeal. And his argument was - in the USA there is no such thing, so to create a national health system would be dangerous. Which sounds to me like saying: because we have a state system that needs reform - perhaps by inventing something like Administrative Justice, perhaps by some other means - we do not dare reform a health system that needs reform. It is using one evil to support another, in the final expectation that both shall endure and worsen. And there I thought that one of the points of democracy was to allow reform.

[mindstalk]

Reform implies believing it's possible. Which is hard when "government is not the solution, government is the problem" is movement dogma.

[fpb]

Exactly. As I said elsewhere (though to the wrong person):
You right-wing anarchists all fail to understand what the Founding Fathers said - their actual words go in one ear and out the other. And as it never occurs to you to imagine that there might be an ethical foundation to the duties of the State - a foundation expressed by Jefferson and his co-signers in language so luminously clear that only ill-will can explain its being misunderstood - you end up with the nightmare of a State that is force for its own sake; from which you escape into anarchistic dreams that will never have any reality. The dreams go away; the nightmare bully State of your own evil dreams becomes reality - because you have rejected the plain substance of Jefferson's luminous words. And that is why every bout of Republican rule ends up leaving the American state more legally omnipotent, more unbound by law or custom, and more indebted and predatory, than it has ever been before. Ayn Randism and George W.Bushism are Siamese twins, and neither can live without the other.