As most of you are aware, Sarah Palin has accused the Obama health care reform initiative of wanting to institute "death panels" that would deny care to her son Trig, who was born with Down's Syndrome.
Unfortunately, Palin seems completely unaware that our current for profit insurance companies will not insure Down's Syndrome children - they incur lots of medical bills and are too expensive. Most insurance companies exclude victims of Down's Syndrome by citing preexisting conditions - a practice President Obama wants to prohibit. Down's Syndrome children are often covered under their parent's policies at birth, but God help these families if they lose their insurance coverage because their employers drop coverage, or for some other reason.
The irony lost on ideologues like Palin is that government health insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid help people who are priced out of the private insurance market - sick people, old people, poor people. The point of a public option and subsidies is to insure that these people are not priced out of the insurance market, and that they have access to regular care. Telling these people that their government wants to kill them is astonishingly irresponsible - and down right immoral.
Does Sarah Palin not understand this? What kind of person is she? She's either an ignorant ideologue who will say whatever she thinks will galvanize political support - or she's a completely immoral liar with no feelings for anyone sharing her situation who is not wealthy. Maybe the better question is, what kind of Christian is she? What kind of Christian scares vulnurable people who are the targets of proposed government beneficence?
Here's some good commentary on this issue from Anonymous Liberal.
JOe H.
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8 comments:
Good question about Palin's faith identitiy and her tactics on the healthcare issue. Like most evangelical people, what shapes her (and their) repsonse to social issues is more political affiliation (i.e. Republican talking points) than authentic or well-informed faith (an even cursory review of Hebrew & Christian texts demonstrates God's concern for the poor, the widow, the orphan and the alien - I think this includes people from Mexico as well!). I think part of the blame for this belongs to leaders of the church who usually do not teach this from their pulpits.
I agree that these tactics are pretty bad. I still hold to my conservative ideals, but I admit that I had mistakenly endorsed this kind of bufoonery during the election because I thought that this was the best way to forward the cause. I agree in principle that low cost health care should be available to all (especially those that fall in between the "too rich for Medicaid, not rich enough for private insurance crowd"), but the government simply cannot literally afford to support another entitlement program, especially one of this size.
Take Social Security for example. Most people my age don't even consider this as a viable option for retirement income because we figure that the well will be dried up (or at most only trickling) well before we reach 65. No politician wants to actually put forth the legislation to do it, but we should scale back SS retirement benefits (except for those who are at a particular "grandfathered" age cutoff point- no pun intended) and make it solely a system that provides benefits for those who cannot support
themselves.
The bottom line is that many entitlement programs balloon to such a point of unsustainability that governments either have to scale them back, or raise taxes on people to serfdom levels. If this ever happened to a government health care program, we would inevitably be faced with cuts in our health care benefits (otherwise referred to as rationed health care), or higher taxes, which would ultimately defeat the original goal of affordable health care.
It's not like there aren't affordable private insurance plans available out there, most times people either don't do enough research to find them, or they would rather spend their money on more important things. When my wife was working part time, I had the choice to either put her on my plan for $400 a month, have her get her own plan for $150 a month, or take no insurance for $0 a month. The first option was obviously expensive, the third one was not viable because we do place a higher budget priority on our health, so we did some research and found the $150 plan, which was more than adequate for our means.
Now I know that not everyone is a 20-30 year-old female in perfect health, but that's where the government could come in offering to subsidize health care for uninsurable people (and I want to emphasize the word SUBSIDIZE meaning that the government is actually working with a private insurer rather than administering the plan themselves). The government is too inefficient to effectively run the proposed health care program and keep costs low. If you've ever been exposed to the frenzy that occurs when government departments have to scramble to frivolously spend the "end-of-year" money in order to
keep the following year's budget intact, you would know what I mean.
P.S. The baby is doing good- he's getting really big and discovering the simple joys of being able to open and close his hands at will :)
Here is a good WSJ Op-Ed talking about some good alternatives to Government health care (available for seven days):
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204251404574342170072865070-email.html
Anonymous,
I couldn't agree with you more. However, another part of the problem is that congregations want to hear what they already believe. It is quite common for pastors to recognize certain truths and be fearful of stating them from the pulpit, given what he or she knows thae vast majority of congregants believe.
Joe
Justin,
The behavior of "crazy" conservatives does not, in my mind, discredit conservative ideas. The behavior of these people indicates that what started out as a conservative movement has morphed into something quite different.
Also, it is not clear to me that the health care reform plans being considered amount to another "entitlement." The plans certainly involve substantial interference with the health insurance market. But that market has proven horribly disfunctional. But intereference with a market is not an entitlement. The plans look more like regulation/individual mandates/subsidies for the poor than an entitlement.
Also, your comments make it seem like you to oppose entitlement spending on the basis of practical considerations, rather than on philosophical grounds. But I'll bet that if we found a way to fund the entitlements we've set up, your opposition would not evaporate. People often argue the practicality of a practice, when their real opposition is more fundamentally philosophical. So, do you have a philosophical objection to entitlement programs - and if so, what is it?
Joe H.
again. like stewart said, there's moderate and crazy, or something like that.
Justin,
Let me just add that the "government" runs Medicare, which spends a very small percentage of its income on administrative costs compared to private insurers - so its not clear that all government programs are inefficient - although many are.
Also, I agree that subsidies for people priced out of the market to buy from private insurers, properly regulated so that they cannot exclude or gauge high risk or high cost people, would be accpetable to me.
Babies are fun - but babies eventually become teenagers! Have fun while it lasts.
Joe H.
Here is an article from Heritage.org that talks about the lower administrative costs number (I know that it is a conservative publication, but it digs into the administrative costs as a measure of efficiency a little deeper):
http://www.heritage.org/Research/HealthCare/wm2505.cfm
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