My own story closely resembles that of the uninsured person in Wolf Blitzer's hypothetical question. I take personal and extreme offense to the behavior in the video. The people in this video would have let me die, or live the rest of my life in extreme pain. And they would do it enthusiastically. If you support these people or their ideas, I have no use for you.
As it was, I spent over a year in extreme pain, until Massachusetts' health care law provided me a path to wellness. I had a herniated disc that was eventually treated with surgery. The surgeon said it was one of the worst he'd seen, he said it looked like a big piece of broccoli sticking out of my spine. I got up and walked around the hospital the next morning after surgery. I walked up and down stairs. For that, I am thankful to this day.
In the video, Ron Paul says I should go to my church for help. For a $14,000 surgery. Or rely on my community? Well, my community did come to my rescue, my community is called Massachusetts. And this is a community that the people on that stage and in that audience sneer at, because it is a community that helped me.
Someone said to me today, well that was just a few jerks in the audience. True, a few people yelled, but there was also quite a big audience applause.
During the 2008 presidential race, a crazy lady in a red shirt stood up at a McCain rally and rambled to Senator McCain that Obama was an arab muslim, etc. McCain did the right thing. Right then and there, he took the microphone from the woman and stopped the craziness. He stood against his own crowd. It was a courageous and honorable act. None of the candidates did any such thing last night.
1 comment:
IMHO, there are two failure points. Yes, pay for service might have worked decades ago. Hospitals, often extensions of churches, did provide for the "poor." As you rightly point, out a community could decide, as Mass did, to tackle this problem without some kind of religious test.
The other failure is the logical fallacy that departing from fee for service was the reason prices went up. There was no collective decision for companies to provide insurance. It was a benefit offered for competitive advantage. The private systems in place were in place as prices climbed. In fact, one argument is that net prices go down because service costs get standardized.
So Paul, assigns an inappropriate cause to an effect. There is no causal connection.
And these audience members are just dicks.
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