The New York Times favors Obama's proposal for making government-managed health care mandatory for everyone, so it can hardly be accused of being uncharitable in describing a rally of supporters. Here is a not untypical excerpt (the rest is much the same, but I'm keeping the quote to a length permitted by fair use:)
Danielle Butler, for example, a graphic designer from Phoenix, said she received an e-mail message from Organizing for America inviting her to attend the rally, and came there to support the president even though health insurance has never been a big issue for her.The article reads like a museum of epistemic pathologies. The last instance is especially telling. The woman's grandson was killed by government health care - and she thinks that she will "help" other kids by making it mandatory for all Americans. Ayn Rand's diagnosis of this kind of pseudo-cognition - "Poison as food, poison as antidote" - was never more directly observable.
“I volunteered at his campaign and just really want to stand behind Obama’s initiatives,” said Ms. Butler, 29. “I support the changes that he wants to bring to our country,” she added. Ms. Butler said that when the rally was over, she felt charged up, but had not learned much new about health care.
Individual motives for attending were also diverse. At a rally at North High School in Denver that drew about 1,500 people, Martha Sullivan was struggling, and failing, to attach a sign that read “Single Payer,” to a chain-link fence in the parking lot. Ms. Sullivan said she was motivated by faith — the United Church of Christ where she worships has urged its members to support health care for all.
“I think people who have Christian beliefs should stand up and say, ‘This is what Jesus would have wanted,’ ” said Ms. Sullivan, 59.
Other people were stoked by personal causes that seemed in some cases only peripheral to a broader societal debate.
“I’m out here if it will help one more kid get medication,” said Johari Ade-Green, 58, of Denver, who was holding a sign with a picture of her grandson, Zumante Lucero, who died in July at age 9 from complications of asthma. Her grandson had insurance under Medicaid and Social Security, she said, but through a mix-up was denied medication.
6 comments:
I am Zumante's grandmother. The writer left out a crucial point while trying to use my grandson's story as an argument for not expanding government healthcare. Let me be perfectly clear! My grandson did not die because he was on Medicaid. He died after being TERMINATED FROM IT!! People who are denied healthcare are in danger of dying. The current system is made up of nonsensical qualifications that one has to meet before being allowed preventative care. Had those barriers not been in place, my grandson, and others like him would be alive today. I support Universal Health Care. Please remember that, when you tell Zumante's story.
The mechanism by which government health care killed your grandson may not be obvious to you, but it is clear to anyone who has observed, from close up, the change in the attitude of physicians and other actual health-care providers since the enactment of Medicaid and all the other programs, regulations and mandates that our government, at all levels, now enforces against them at gunpoint.
Before the enactment of Medicaid, the typical GP reserved most of the supply of free samples from pharmaceutical companies, for giving out to indigent patients - like your grandson. Now, the normal benevolence, and the normal regard of one human for the life of another, all that existed before the age of government intervention at gunpoint, are gone. Because no person with a modicum of honor and self-respect will regard being treated as a sacrificial beast of burden (which is how government mandates treat the men and women who actually provide health care to the rest of us) as something to be reciprocated with benevolence.
Under government mandates, professionals who are deprived of the freedom and respect that would have paid for their voluntary good will in better times, now insist on cash. Take away the freedom and respect, and then take away the Medicare payment too - and remember, it was a government bureaucrat who took that payment away from your son's doctor - and you are left demanding that your fellow human who is providing the health care, be made to work, like a slave, under the gun and the whip. Do you really think that this is the kind of health care that ought to be mandated for American children - and for the rest of us?
Is there a socio-biological basis for your claim about the "normal benevolence" a human being would show? Just curious...
NP,
"Sociobiology" is too often heavy on inituition (which itself is far from anything epistemically reliable) and light on anything resembling real evidence. The evidence for benevolence as a principle of human interactions comes from historical observation - some of it, for me, personal - and from philosophers and ethologists.
Any particular thinkers you would recommend reading?
NP,
Those mentioned in the blog post you are commenting on...
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