Now it seems some of my fellow Kossacks have gotten some silly notions about health care reform in to their silly little heads. But never fear, I am happy to set you straight. I hope the points below will leave you in no doubt about where you stand on health care reform and what you're going to do about it.
So, without further ado let us proceed.
Update: Now with less spelling and grammar errors and more poll!
- Rationing is OK so long as it leads to bigger profits for private companies and shareholders.
This is the free market in action and it is a GOOD THING. It allows rich people to jump to the front of the queue to get the best health care in the world without having dirty smelly poor people clogging up the health system. (See point 2) The only consideration that should be made when deciding if a person should receive a treatment is the profit margin. So long as the private insurance companies have a
Healthy profit margin the actual health of the nation is an irrelevant triviality.
Rationing based on public decisions made by publicly accountable people taking in to account cost and clinical effectiveness of treatments and the need to most effectively allocate limited funds in a fair way to improve the nation’s overall health is socialism. Socialism leads to communism and is a BAD THING.
- If you’re poor you don’t deserve healthcare.
Rich people, without exception, are all rich through their own exertions and moral superiority. Having rich parents or a rich spouse automatically imbues them with these qualities and makes them suited to high paying jobs. Never forget that the free market is infallible and only jobs which pay high salaries are worth while. Low wage jobs like hospital cleaner, care home assistant, factory worker, shop assistant etc are only done by people who do not deserve to have well paying jobs. These low paying jobs do not generate a lot of capital and are pretty much useless. The people doing these jobs must therefore not deserve health care. If every low waged worker were to develop terminal illness tomorrow and be doomed to die through lack of affordable treatment America would be perfectly OK because the people who do the really important jobs like stock trading, PR and lobbying would be able to keep the economy functioning through sheer faith in the free market.
The invisible hand of the free market works in other ways to let us know who does and does not deserve health care. People who lose their health insurance through redundancy, people who are denied coverage because of pre-existing conditions and people who are unable to afford high health insurance premiums and charges are all sacrifices to the glory of the free market. Each one of these people is an anti-American communist and in no way deserving of empathy or respect.
- Health care spending is wasteful. Defence spending is essential.
It is OK to spend Billions of dollars to fight foreign wars and hunt suspected terrorists because they pose a potential threat to American citizens. It is also OK to lie about the reasons for going to war and to torture and disregard the law but this should be obvious to every right minded person. It is NOT OK to spend a fraction of that money fighting a health care crisis that is killing Americans every day. This is because poor people are not really good Americans; indeed many of them are foreign looking (like the terrorists) and live in urban areas. As Palin taught us Real Americans live in rural areas and vote republican. Some people live in rural areas and do not have good affordable health care. These people are poor and therefore DO NOT COUNT. Defence spending to protect Americans from Bombs is a GOOD thing. Health spending to protect Americans from cancer is a BAD thing. The first is nationalism and is patriotic. The second is communism and is satanic.
- No new research will occur if drug companies are made to reduce their profits.
As we all know no one has ever managed to produce a cheap generic drug that works as well as an expensive brand-name counterpart. Stem cell research was doing fine whilst the republicans banned Federal spending on it, now that Obama has reversed that decision it’s doomed to failure, tainted with the brush of socialism. Some people will tell you that drug companies spend more on advertising than on research and that most of the research money goes on slight variations of existing drugs in order to generate new patents. What these people don’t appreciate is that the drug companies’ purpose is profit and that drug research is only useful when it can improve profits. This is why diseases which affect developing countries are unworthy of research spending. Government run science projects never amount to anything. The Manhattan project, Nasa and the human genome project are all stark examples of how public spending cripples science. Scientists are solely motivated money and would never conduct research to help people or improve knowledge.
- Good doctors and nurses would NEVER work for the government.
Good doctors and nurses like good scientists are exclusively motivated by money and crucially they are not socialists and will not work for the so-called public good. Any doctor or nurse who puts patients before profits is a secret communist sympathiser and is dangerous to the health and well being of good, freedom loving and most importantly capitalist Americans. If allowed to practice they will propagate their evil communist propaganda. It is evident that in all the unfortunate countries that have socialised medicine such as Britain, Canada, Spain, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, Holland, Norway etc there are no good Doctors or nurses or surgeons or psychiatrists or radiologists…
- Medical professionals are not qualified to make medical decisions.
A medical doctor who has merely gone to medical school for years and practiced medicine for many further years is woefully under qualified to be making any medical decisions. These decisions must be made by the people who know best the health insurance company bureaucrats. Please note that unlike government bureaucrats who are EVIL. These bureaucrats are part of the free market and are GOOD. They will take in to primary consideration the most important factor; the private insurance company’s bottom line. If you are denied coverage by them please don’t forget that they are making sure you as a patient don’t take undue precedence over the shareholders.
- America’s health statistics are a sign of a healthy free market.
The pro-reform conspirators may tell you to look at the health statistics of countries with socialised medicine to compare them with American health statistics or to compare costs. Statistics are a communist propaganda tool which use devious methods like ‘research’ and ‘record keeping’ and ‘basic numeracy’ Do not be fooled by them. Remember that the statistics only look bad because poor people who as we know don’t deserve health care in the first place are included. This skews the statistics. The real statistics should show only rich and healthy people.
- Lawmakers have got better things to do than reform health care.
Politicians and their staff already enjoy the benefits of good cheap health care. They haven’t got time to worry about whether the people who voted for them have. They have more important things than health care reform to worry about, like accepting big cheques from private insurance companies and drug companies.
- Finally and most importantly. You may as well give up now.
Efforts at health care reform are certain to fail. Campaigning for health care reform is useless because it will never work anyway. The current system works just fine and provides good health care to everyone who deserves it. Making calls to the numbers in this diary http://www.dailykos.com/... to demand states’ rights to single payer systems is a waste of time.
Donating via the link at the bottom of this diary is a waste of money http://www.dailykos.com/... Calling your senator to demand a public option is futile.
You might as well give up now Kossacks, after all this time last year you thought you could help get a black man elected president!
And for those who didn’t guess already…
snark!