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Conservatives Move To Trying To Trick Lower Income People Out Of Health Care
I said it repeatedly during the battles over health care reform and I’ll say it again: Most of the paranoia and hysteria coming from the right over Obamacare (they’ll regret naming it after him when the exchanges plus subsidies become one of the most popular government programs running 10 years hence) boils down to one of the most base emotions on the right: The fear and disgust that boils up when they fear they will have to share something with lower class people. I’ve dubbed it the “waiting room problem”: conservatives are deeply, unshakably afraid that once the uninsured start getting insurance, they’ll have to sit next to them in doctors’ waiting rooms, and that’s what they don’t want to happen.
You may laugh, but if you think about it, this fear of having to share spaces with “others” who have less money than they do—and who may be, gasp, different than they are—drives a whole shitload of conservative policy preferences and hang-ups. The hostility towards any attempt to improve public transportation is expressing a direct preference for unmanageable traffic over having to sit on a train or a bus with poor people (even though no one actually makes you use public transportation, but I guess the mere temptation of using the train is so serious that the rest of us have to give access). Hatred of immigrants and the ugly hostility towards cities? Same thing. There’s a tendency on the right to see lower income people as inherently contaminating, as if their very presence degrades everything around them by the force of magic or something. Witness George Will blaming “culture”—which is a conservative code word for the presence of lower income people and definitely for lower income people of color—for the problems Detroit is facing. Pay special attention to his freak-out over reading and literacy rates.
... All these problems have solutions, usually involving investment in communities and investment in decent paying jobs, but Will seems rock solid certain that it’s the poor people themselves that are the problem, that their mere presence is a contaminant that spreads—people themselves are viewed as the problem to be avoided or contained, instead of as people who have problems, such as lack of health care, that need to be fixed.
On the contrary, to the conservative mind, the last thing you want to do is help fix people’s problems, because the fixes usually involve creating situations where various classes of people have more contact. That’s how conservative thinking goes: If working class people have insurance, they’ll go to the doctor. It might be my doctor and then their very presence will ruin everything!
...
This one guy decided to protest a line of people waiting for a flu shot, if you want a general idea of what emotionally compels the right.
While this asshole would like you to believe the “problem” is letting everyone access health care, the real problem was that the H1N1 vaccine had just come out, so of course there was a mad rush to get it. In real life, most health care situations do not have everyone at once trying to get care. But this is the narrative that conservatives are humping: If lower income people are allowed in the system, then they’re going to DESTROY EVERYTHING!!!11!!11!!1!1!!! So they’re using every underhanded trick they can in hopes of keeping people out.
Yeah, it’s ugly. I don’t know what else to say. It should make you angry. It’s infuriating.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/31/conservatives-move-to-trying-to-trick-lower-income-people-out-of-health-care/
You may laugh, but if you think about it, this fear of having to share spaces with “others” who have less money than they do—and who may be, gasp, different than they are—drives a whole shitload of conservative policy preferences and hang-ups. The hostility towards any attempt to improve public transportation is expressing a direct preference for unmanageable traffic over having to sit on a train or a bus with poor people (even though no one actually makes you use public transportation, but I guess the mere temptation of using the train is so serious that the rest of us have to give access). Hatred of immigrants and the ugly hostility towards cities? Same thing. There’s a tendency on the right to see lower income people as inherently contaminating, as if their very presence degrades everything around them by the force of magic or something. Witness George Will blaming “culture”—which is a conservative code word for the presence of lower income people and definitely for lower income people of color—for the problems Detroit is facing. Pay special attention to his freak-out over reading and literacy rates.
... All these problems have solutions, usually involving investment in communities and investment in decent paying jobs, but Will seems rock solid certain that it’s the poor people themselves that are the problem, that their mere presence is a contaminant that spreads—people themselves are viewed as the problem to be avoided or contained, instead of as people who have problems, such as lack of health care, that need to be fixed.
On the contrary, to the conservative mind, the last thing you want to do is help fix people’s problems, because the fixes usually involve creating situations where various classes of people have more contact. That’s how conservative thinking goes: If working class people have insurance, they’ll go to the doctor. It might be my doctor and then their very presence will ruin everything!
...
This one guy decided to protest a line of people waiting for a flu shot, if you want a general idea of what emotionally compels the right.
While this asshole would like you to believe the “problem” is letting everyone access health care, the real problem was that the H1N1 vaccine had just come out, so of course there was a mad rush to get it. In real life, most health care situations do not have everyone at once trying to get care. But this is the narrative that conservatives are humping: If lower income people are allowed in the system, then they’re going to DESTROY EVERYTHING!!!11!!11!!1!1!!! So they’re using every underhanded trick they can in hopes of keeping people out.
Yeah, it’s ugly. I don’t know what else to say. It should make you angry. It’s infuriating.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/07/31/conservatives-move-to-trying-to-trick-lower-income-people-out-of-health-care/
7 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
http://www.giveforward.com/
This is the conservative vision for how ordinary people should be covered for medical expenses.
This is the conservative vision for how ordinary people should be covered for medical expenses.
