This past weekend, I was walking home wearing an Obama shirt. Walking because gas costs a million dollars now and I'm trying to do as little as possible to contribute to Exxon's bottom line. As I passed a used bookstore, a man commented on my shirt.
I stopped and chatted with him for a minute and then he said "Yeah... I still don't know who I'm voting for yet."
I said "Are you kidding me? Is there a choice? McCain's such an asshole!"
Idiot: "If it weren't for the war, I'd vote for McCain hands down. The Democrats want to socialize everything. They practically want a national bed time."
The conversation that followed is SO TELLING about everything that's wrong with America, and why we need to win in November to make it right.
Cross posted at La Vida Locavore
Me: National bed time? No they don't. What specifically don't you like?
Him: Socialized medicine, for example! You get no service. You can't see a doctor when you need one.
Me: Have you been to a country with national healthcare?
Him: No.
I never would have guessed.
Me: I have. I lived in England. I got really sick and I had to see a doctor. I walked to a clinic, got right in, and saw the doctor for free. My prescription drugs were $9 apiece.
Him: But I don't want to pay for someone else's healthcare. They should buy insurance. It's cheap. I have insurance. It's $1200 per year.
Me: Does your employer give it to you?
Him: No, I buy it. It's catastrophic coverage. That's all you need.
No, it isn't all you need. Take it from someone with a chronic condition. Once you are sick - and most people will be at SOME point in their lives - the bills add up quick if you aren't insured.
Him: These people - I see them - new cars, cell phones. They have the money, they just waste it instead of spending it on insurance.
Me: I worked in a county hospital. They don't have money. Maybe a few take advantage of the system but I've seen for myself that they don't have money --
Him: I'm not paying for someone else's health care.
Me: Listen to me. You already are. I work in health care.
At this point the man needed to get back behind the counter of the used bookstore where he works - he had been outside smoking. (Yeah, I know, good move to smoke a cigarette, Mr. All-I-Need-Is-Catastrophic-Coverage.) I started walking towards my apartment and before I got to the end of the block, I turned around. I wanted to finish this fight.
Point #1 I wanted to make (and never did) is that I saw for myself that these people don't have money when I worked at Parkland, a hospital that serves primarily Medicaid/Medicare patients. A lot of the cancer patients would need to get labs before their chemo. The quickest way to do it is to come to the hospital the day before, get your labs drawn, and then come back the next day for chemo after they result the labs.
But the patients often didn't have cars. Many times they needed babysitters, or there were other factors in play that made it very hard for them to travel to the hospital. So instead of coming for labs the day before, the cancer patients would come for one VERY LONG DAY at the hospital - labs first, wait for the results, and then get chemo - because then they only had to make one trip to the hospital and not two.
Can you imagine? Having cancer, feeling like shit, and because you need to take public trans (or in other cases, they had cars but could barely afford the $4 parking fee so they'd come for one day instead of two), you have to spend HOURS in a hospital waiting room??? These aren't people with fancy cell phones, I can promise you. They are broke.
So I went back to talk to him in the bookstore. As I did I heard him telling the customer he was helping a famous quote about if you aren't a liberal when you are young, you don't have a heart, but if you aren't a conservative when you grow up, you don't have a brain.
I tried to tell him Point #2 that I wanted to make: With all of the inefficiencies in the current system, chances are that covering everyone in a national system won't cost you any extra money whatsoever. And furthermore, you are already paying for people who aren't insured - when people can't pay for primary care, they end up in the ER with much bigger bills that they also can't pay. Who do you think pays for that? The hospital eats the cost, raises prices to compensate, and the insurance companies pass off the increased prices to us.
So I said to him that he already pays for people because they wind up in the ER with big problems that could have been cared for cheaply when they were still little problems.
Him: They should fix that then. They shouldn't let you in the ER unless you can pay.
Me: So someone should die because they can't afford insurance?
Him: I'm not paying. There are private charities.
Me: You're an idiot.
And I stomped out of the store. I'm never shopping there again. There's a liberal used bookstore across the street. I'll go there.
As I walked home, I thought about all of the things in society that make the poor sick. People like this guy don't mind when the government makes these people sick with their policies, but then they don't want the government to help make them well.
Example: Nebraska Beef gets in trouble with the USDA in 2003 - and sues the USDA. Then it kills a woman with E. coli. Her family sues Nebraska Beef, so Nebraska Beef company sues the woman's church (because she ate the tainted beef at a church picnic). Now Nebraska Beef is recalling 5.3 million lbs of beef after making 41 more people sick.
[Side note here - you know how the Republicans want "tort reform" to get rid of frivolous lawsuits? What about the kind of reform that could keep Nebraska Beef from suing a church that bought and served their product. Talk about frivolous lawsuit.]
How is it the government's fault (partially, not entirely) for making people sick? In this case, the government subsidizes corn/soy which makes it cheaper to factory farm and feed cows on corn and soy. And guess what kind of cow diet gives you E. coli problems? You guessed it. The factory farm corn and soy diet.
If you feed a cow grass, their gut isn't acidic. Most E. coli in there aren't adapted to live in an acidic environment, so if for some reason our meat gets tainted with cow poo, our stomach acid kills the E. coli. When you feed a cow what they do at the factory farms, the cow's gut becomes acidic and the E. coli in there can survive our stomach acid.
Subsidies make the corn and soy cheap. Laws allow factory farms to feed them to cows. Laws could call for switching the cows' diets to alfalfa a few days before slaughter to cut down on some 99% of E. coli 0157:H7 but they don't. And then the USDA inspectors allow the meatpacking plants to stay open, and the laws allow them to force workers to work at lightning fast speeds that cause more errors (as well as more injuries to the workers).
Here's another example: Studies in several countries found that certain artifical food dyes cause behavioral problems. Other countries like the UK are making these food dyes illegal. Not us. It's all legal here. Let your kid drink Mountain Dew and eat skittles and if they act up, put 'em on Ritalin. But the government won't negotiate for lower drug prices, nor will they give you a health care system that makes it possible for many to get prescription drug coverage.
And what about school lunches? Remember those downer cows we were feeding our kids? The government will make sure schools can spend about $1 on food per kid per meal, and they'll throw in some free low quality beef and cheese as a subsidy to the beef & dairy industries. They won't ban sodas in the schools, even though a Harvard study (cited in Appetite for Profit by Michele Simon) shows that each soda a kid drinks per day increases their risk of obesity by 60%.
Mexico took chocolate milk out of their schools - but we don't do that. We let our kids get fat. We let them grow up to be adults with heart disease, hypertension, and diabetes. And then we don't do a damn thing to help them get health care.
So this same idiot who doesn't want a national bed time - I'm guessing he'd throw a fit if some "socialist" Democrat proposed taking soda machines out of schools, or spending more on school lunches so schools could afford healthier foods. Nope - gotta keep helping those corporations. And then when the corporations make the people sick? By all means, don't give those people health care.