Sunday, January 31, 2010

Why Has Support For Healthcare Declined?

There are not many people in America who support people suffering or dying because they don't have access to the healthcare system. Maybe a few of the seriously mentally ill right-wing types like this idea, but the vast majority of Americans do not. Almost no one in American supports people having to go bankrupt and lose their homes when a family member gets sick, or allowing insurance companies to routinely cancel a health insurance policy once someone gets sick.

There was overwhelming support nine months ago for universal health care, and now support for Obama's ultralight version that he called health care reform has declined so far that it probably is dead. So the big question that needs to be answered is Why? As the debate went along Obama and his team conceded increasingly greater parts of reform to the right-wing Republican position. Drug companies were not reigned in. A great many intelligent people said from the beginning that only a single payer system would work, yet Obama quickly dispensed with both it and even the far weaker public option which had overwhelming public support.

The public didn't like seeing middle class working people have to pay higher taxes, while the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy remain in force. Taxes on rich folks are lower now that they were in Ronald Raygun's era. People felt uncomfortable that even if Obama's bill were to pass, millions of Americans would still not be covered.

Not many people liked the idea of using the IRS and stiff penalties to require even poor people to buy health insurance from the greedy private health insurance companies. We don't even do this with automobile liability insurance, and it certainly is the wrong approach with health care. After a full year of blah-blah-blah the American congress remains so arrogant that they still have not even studied what works in Canada, Britain, France, Holland, or Germany. Their attitude is still that the bozos in Washington know more than anyone else in the world. About everything. Wildly inflated egos, almost to the point of psychopathy.

So people in America keep on dying of medical situations which could be cured if the crowd in Washington, D.C. had just done their jobs properly. And people are still being forced into bankruptcy and losing their homes due to high medical bills.

I am saddened almost to the point of despair to see the government of a great country like the U.S.A. becoming so corrupt, behaving with such incompetence, and to watch America fall this far.

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