I mostly stopped reading the Daily Dish about a month ago when Conor Clarke and Conor Friedersdorf took over for a half-week or so. Suddenly, instead of short diatribes about Sarah Palin and random scatter plots from Pollster.com inexplicably titled “Reality Check”, we were subjected to multi-paragraph treatises on stuff like dating strategies and what it’s really like to live inside the beltway. Who are these dudes anyway? Neither one of them is the guy from Bright Eyes, right? And why does Conor Friedersdorf have a blog on the Daily Beast? I thought you had to be the child of someone famous, like Chris Buckley or Megan McCain, to get that gig. I guess I’d be more charitable if he weren’t writing things like this:
On arriving in Orange County, California, I expected hostility to President Obama’s health-care agenda, especially in my Republican family. But it surprised me to hear my Catholic grandmother say that if health-care reform passes bureaucrats will show up at her door advising euthanasia—and especially to hear my mother, now undergoing chemotherapy, insist that were Obamacare already law it is more likely than not that she’d now be dead.
[….]My grandmother, my mother, and countless other Americans may be misinformed about the particulars of health-care reform, and express certain misbegotten fears, but health care proponents would do well to understand the anxiety’s source: Theirs is ultimately a fear of rapid, sweeping policy shifts, especially those brought about by lengthy, amorphous legislative proposals that leave unclear exactly what might change the month after next.
The changes for people already on Medicare will be minimal. Everyone Everyone who has kept up with the actual legislation knows that. The “death panel” bullshit comes from a (very good) provision about end-of-life counseling championed by a right-wing Republican from Georgia.
But more to the point, how can anyone possibly say that, if people don’t understand legislation perfectly, then it’s perfectly reasonable for them to assume that it will lead to Logan’s Run-style eliminationist dystopia? To me, that makes about as much sense as reading that there are strong gamma bursts 3,000 light years away and concluding that alien civilizations are likely to begin belting us with pints of ice cream traveling at the speed of light.
In other words, it’s just the kind of nonsense we’ve grown accustomed to hearing from second-tier, pseduo-intellectual internet pundits.
R-Jud
Mmmmm… ice cream from space.
Alan in SF
What flavor ice cream?
schrodinger's cat
Sullivan’s current understudies are not that much better either.
freelancer
It’s gotta be freeze-dried.
http://www.astronauticecreamshop.com/index.php?crn=205&rn=392&action=show_detail
Brendan
@Alan in SF:
Rocky Road, or should I say Meteor Macadam
cleek
err, that’s not even close to true. most people don’t know that at all – because the hear exactly the opposite from their Rep’s, their favorite media sources, their friends, their families, and the chain emails they get.
different church-lady
Read this and all will be understood:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monsters_Are_Due_on_Maple_Street
Erik Vanderhoff
Friedersdorf blogs at the American Scene and was at The Atlantic’s “Ideas” blog. He’s nice enough, but prone to sweeping statements that aren’t entirely well thought-out. I have no idea who Clarke is.
cyd
Conor Clarke’s a bit of a blow-hard. I recall a brief exchange with him
on the Atlantic politics blog comments, after he criticized Obama for claiming that America invented solar technology. When I pointed out that the photovoltaic solar cell was, indeed, invented in America (in Bell labs, in the 60s), he responded with loads of hot air before finally saying that we had to “agree to disagree”.
Wag
But more to the point, how can anyone possibly say that, if people don’t understand legislation perfectly, then it’s perfectly reasonable for them to assume that it will lead to Logan’s Run-style eliminationist dystopia?
Patients have been trained by the media over the couse of many years to distrust science and anything that approaches intellectual challange. Ocum’s razor has been turned on its head, and everything gets taken to it’s (il)logical conclusion.
If a program would make it simple to disucss your personal wishes for end of life care, then the logical conclusion is that your life will end, and soon.
Zifnab
@cleek: Correction. The changes for people already on Medicare will be minimal. Everyone that has kept up with the actual legislation knows that.
The media doesn’t report on the actual content of the five outstanding bills, just the controversy should anyone kick up a big enough firestorm. It’s the same thing as the birfer nonsense. There is slim coverage of the actual existence of a birth certificate and wall-to-wall coverage of the raving mobs insisting that a certificate does not exist. If you don’t tune in at the right time, or if you get up to pee, all you hear is “Blah blah he-said blah blah she-said blah blah will this dispute ever be resolved? (we hope not)”
The Grand Panjandrum AKA Americans for America
I do like reading Freiersdorf, unfortunately he does suffer from the rare, but nonetheless aggravating bout of pearl clutching and tsk-tsking. Like Sullivan, he has his moments when he is quite entertaining and even inciteful. I guess it just depends on the time of the month when you read him, eh?
linda
ugh, i’ve completely given up on tina’s latest vanity project. it must drive her nuts that arianna got there first.
The Grand Panjandrum AKA Americans for America
Ooops, forgot too mention that at least he doesn’t go overboard and start bitching about eating ketchup on hotdogs. ( I know, wrong movie, but still you get my drift.)
me
Not necessary. If it’s moving at the speed of light, it’s clock will have stopped so it’ll never spoil.
steve s
Remember, to find out the relativistic calories, multiply by gamma.
Violet
No they do not.
I had dinner with some older relatives last night, who are smart people and of whom I’m very fond. They are Republicans and do watch Fox news. But they’re not without brains and do think for themselves. You wouldn’t know it from the discussion of health care we had, though.
First I was told that if Obama gets his way, Medicare is going to disappear. Then they told me that under Obama’s plan they were “expendable” and wouldn’t be covered. And finally, that there were death panels that would decide if they could have coverage for treatments and likely they wouldn’t be deemed worthy and would die.
I tried to counter and told them there were already “death panels,” but they were insurance companies that decided what and who was covered. And that we deal with that on a daily basis for our healthcare. And how much time and energy we’ve wasted dealing with insurance companies about covering what they say they’ll cover. And that we’ve had at least one friend who was essentially killed by the insurance company that refused to cover his leukemia treatment. But first his company fired him (because his treatment raised their premium) and then he and his wife and four children almost went bankrupt trying to cover his treatment costs. And then he died.
My relatives didn’t have facts to respond, just fear. So they mumbled something about “it’ll just get worse if Obama’s plan passes,” exchanged knowing looks with each other, and we all agreed to change the subject.
I know I can’t change their minds. We’ve had similar discussions for years. They do believe what they are hearing from “their people”, though – the Fox news types and various other Republican talking points they’re getting from friends.
They really believe Medicare is going to go away and they’ll be left twisting in the wind. Please do NOT discount the fear that older people have that they’ll be left with nothing. It’s a real fear and underlies some of what we’re seeing.
John Hamilton Farr
IMO Obama made a monstrously bad calculation by not presenting a stripped-down, bare-bones basic universal health care bill of his own and then letting Congress festoon it with the usual bullshit.
What we have now is nothing BUT the usual bullshit and constantly shifting presidential declarations of support for… um, something, whatever it is. I think that’s why it’s so hard to even argue FOR the administration’s efforts, because nobody knows what the hell we’re fighting for. Obama says one thing, the Senate quite another, and many of us feel betrayed before we’ve even started. It’s all to amorphous and contradictory, and the president seems all too willing to do whatever our corporate masters dictate.
All I know is that reading about 100% free care received for debilitating, long-term illnesses in places like the UK and France almost makes me cry: that the richest country in the world won’t provide the same for its citizens is nothing less than outrageous, cruel, and tragic. If any political party could give us similar care in this country, they’d be in power for decades. Instead, we just get continued obeisance to obscene CEO salaries & bonuses that require the fleecing of the American people, and the ship of state sinks slowly into the cesspool of history. Quite the legacy for Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, and all…
PeakVT
Shorter Freezerdork: It Obama’s fault that my family hasn’t been de-stupidized.
cleek
The changes for people already on Medicare will be minimal.
i know that, you know that.
Everyone that has kept up with the actual legislation knows that.
sadly, that’s a really small group of people.
Faux News
I for one will welcome our Cold Stone Creamery alien overlords smiting us with their product.
Michael
Fuck it – I’m done. Cancel Medicare. America’s geezers are too fucking deluded and grasping to support in their dotage.
Zifnab
@cleek: And who can blame them. There’s five bills. Some stretching to 1200 pages in length. And even the best of blogs have relatively slim digests on what they contain.
If you asked me to give a synopsis of any given one of the bills, I could sputter out maybe five or six facts and hopefully three of them would be right.
The Dems need a consolidated bill – or at least an agreed on schema – they can point to and say, “Here: this is the plan”.
Until this shit gets out of committee and into comprehensive legislation, it’s going to be a massive rumor orgy.
Napoleon
@John Hamilton Farr:
Obama has just completely lost me with his complete lack of leadership and corporatist/Eisenhower Republican BS.
Lola
@Violet:
If these people will not respond with facts, what can you do but discount them? It is a waste of time to engage people who trust Glenn Beck more than their own relatives. I mean, really, they simply have to be ignored at this point. If we took their “feelings” into account we would have no health care reform and the millions in this country who are uninsured will remain so.
Fencedude
@Napoleon:
You realize that Obama is, and always has been, just about in the same place on the spectrum as Eisenhower was, right?
Bulworth
@Michael:
Yeah.
Morbo
I believe Conor Clarke is the Atlantic’s more competent econo-blogger. Yes, I am damning him with faint praise.
Bulworth
@Lola:
What Lola said.
Morbo
Oh yeah, OT, any fan of the electric guitar should know that Les Paul has died at the ripe old age of 94.
Tax Analyst
I keep seeing comments in this thread from folks savoring some upcoming ice cream-astical event, but if you read DougJ’s sentence it sounds like he’s portraying that possibility as unlikely and non-sensical. That makes me really sad, and I really feel like a big party-pooper pointing this out to all you ice-cream expectant commenters. But somebody has to do it
Per DougJ:
“To me, that makes about as much sense as reading that there are strong gamma bursts 3,000 light years away and concluding that alien civilizations are likely to begin belting us with pints of ice cream traveling at the speed of light.”
Again, I must reiterate my feelings: “Boo-hoo, I wanna have inter-galactic ice cream”
Wag
If it’s moving at the speed of light, it’s clock will have stopped so it’ll never spoil.
…or melt
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
Am I the only one who thinks that a lot of the messaging problems on healthcare are caused by Obama’s fanatical desire to always treat the American public like adults? That is, he talks about “controlling costs” instead of “fighting the insurance companies”, and insurance reform instead of “medicare for all”, and generally avoids fearmongering against the insurance companies because he really wants the public to understand the issues?
I think there are a handful of sound bytes that would change the healthcare debate dramatically and would actually get reported on the news were he to say them. But instead, he insists on these long, involved answers which the media universally fails to cover or at least paraphrase.
gypsy howell
Why is anyone (including dems) worrying about what the medicare crowd thinks? Their coverage isn’t going to change, so when it’s all said and done, they’re going to be happy with whatever the result is. Let them shriek and cry right now.
The only reason for a politician to fear the wrath of the medicare crowd is if the plan actually DID make their situation worse, in which case the seniors would take it out on politicians in 2010 at the ballot box. But nothing IS going to change.
The whole thing is nuts.
But it’s nuts because Obama and the dems allowed it to get nuts.
Leelee for Obama
@Fencedude: This is something like what I said about him yesterday, on some other thread. He’s a pragmatist. Oh, noes! I’ve learned that Ike was a better man than I thought he was, and I learned as well, that JFK was no lefty, and I’ve learned as well, that politics is, indeed, “the art of the possible”. Someday, there will be single-payer in this country, but I won’t live to see it, except for Medicare. Someday, there will a guaranteed wage in this country, and I may need it, as I’ll likely have to work till I die. Someday, maybe sooner than later, there will be a SCOTUS that will curtail the Corporations and their willing minions. The Constitution was written vaguely, so there’s all kinds of ways to skin an elephant or a donkey; what’s needed is true understanding on the part of the polity that things suck enough nowfinally for it to suck for them. I’d quote Hemingway with the Bells tolling and all, but is that really necessary?
Tax Analyst
@ The Grand Panjandrum AKA Americans for America:
“inciteful”???
I had to think that one through a bit. It seems a fitting word for some of the fa-caca going on with the zombified protestor’s, but I think you were going for “insightful” here, maybe.
But I think “inciteful” ought to be incorporated as a real word now, considering how things are and where they are going. It would seem a useful expression these days.
CMcC
You quote: “My grandmother, my mother, and countless other Americans may be misinformed about the particulars of health-care reform, and express certain misbegotten fears, but health care proponents would do well to understand the anxiety’s source…”
WTF? This guy knows bullshit, but it’s not his responsibility to call bullshit; in fact, he will no doubt go on spreading what he knows to be bullshit, while describing his bullshit in such a way that he has some sort of deniability.
What a cynical hypocrite.
Corner Stone
@Morbo: Was he straight up death paneled?
Punchy
OT:
Allow me to introduce you all to the next guest on tonite’s MSNBC, Fox, Loud Obbs show, Hardball, and Hannity….
wow.
Like I proffered yesterday…the worse you act, the more face time you’re given. Such a fucking perverse media before this time I cannot recall.
gypsy howell
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason:
You know, if they had just started out with “Medicare-for-All” and actually called it that, you wouldn’t have seniors all up in arms about it. Half these oldsters don’t realize medicare is a government program, but they DO know they like it.
Sure would have taken the boogie-man out of a lot of this discussion.
blahblahblah
Aliens pelting us with ice cream gamma ray bursts sounds like a wonderful way to take care of global warming and resolve my sweet tooth all at once! Why are you knocking this – good – conservative idea?
Napoleon
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason:
MGMR said: “But instead, he insists on these long, involved answers which the media universally fails to cover or at least paraphrase.”
Worse yet, someone will ask him something like “Are you going to kill grandma” and it takes him 100 words to mention the word no. It’s easy enough, even if you are going to give a long involved answer to say “No, and the reason why is . . . .” I am increasingly thinking he isn’t that great of a communicator.
The Saff
@Violet: People like my parents, who don’t use a PC and don’t have internet access, are easily fooled by the misinformation that’s out there. I’m not excusing them, I’m just saying. I can’t have a political discussion on the phone with my dad without it getting ugly. I try to explain stuff to my mom but it’s hard to tell if she understands.
The rest of us can find the bills on line. I just did a Google search on “HR 3200” and got a PDF of the 1,017 page bill that came out of the House committees on Energy and Commerce, Ways and Means, Education and Labor, Oversight and Government Reform, and Budget. It has a table of contents so you can see what’s where.
The link is http://energycommerce.house.gov/Press_111/20090714/aahca.pdf.
gypsy howell
@Punchy:
How crazy do you have to be to think you can walk around anywhere with a sign like that, and not get the secret service on your ass?
Michelle and the kids too? Yikes.
gypsy howell
@Napoleon:
He wants to talk to us like we’re adults. He forgets that half the adult population is either stupid or nuts, or both.
Mark S.
Thinking that the government is going to kill you is not being “misinformed about the particulars of health-care reform.”
What lazy, stupid analysis. Those two proposals failed for different reasons (and were opposed by very different factions), but none of those reasons were that they were too comprehensive.
mclaren
Francis 7, we have a runner in quadrant 3. His name is DougJ.
schrodinger's cat
I love how these pundits purport to speak for all of America.They have a certain opinion, their friend or someone in the family has a similar opinion, ergo, all real Americans think like they do.
Leelee for Obama
@gypsy howell: And, in addition, why are they only her kids? Should I infer something from that, I wonder? I think my brain may really explode before this episode of legislation insanity is over. Sweet Jesus on a bicycle, these people make me ill.
kay
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason:
I think you’re probably giving him too much credit. I believe they didn’t go after the insurance companies because they thought they could co-opt them, in a sense. Offer them concessions in return for the insurance companies not going ballistic anti-reform.
They did that early. I’m afraid the insurance companies covered both bases, however. A lot of the alphabet-soup conservative orgs are essentially stand-ins for insurance company interests. Their interests coincide, shall we say. This way, the insurance companies are actually at the reform table, while the stand-ins get their hands dirty, fighting reform. They win concessions in reform, and fight reform, at the same time. It’s win-win for them.
JK
Thanks for the allusion to one of the great films of the 1970’s, Three Days of the Condor.
Andrew Sullivan should take a page from the Monty Python sketch where all of the professors in a college philosophy dept are named Bruce.
In addition to the Clarke and Friedersdorf, Sullivan should have Conor Mullen Oberst (The Conor from Bright Eyes), Conor Jackson, Conor McPherson, Conor Casey, and Conor Lenihan blogging at the Daily Dish.
MH
@Wag:
Only from our perspective. The ice cream’s clock will move as normal, as the ice cream measures things.
stormhit
You know, the series of “dating strategies” posts you’re mocking turned out to be chillingly relevant just a couple weeks later after the Pittsburgh shooting.
Napoleon
@gypsy howell:
And there is nothing wrong with that. Face it, if you want to get reform passed you have to convince people to do it, and talking to them like adults is one good way to do that. The Republicans have always had it easy. All they need to do is scream and scare the s–t out of people. But more and more it looks like we are going to get a piece of crap bill because he just does not appear to be leading, and his sales job is muddled (maybe because he doesn’t know what he wants out of the bill).
Max
I think the link’d article below is a great one for those dems that are already calling Obama the worst president evah, or the HRC fetishers.
I think Begala makes some really good points.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/12/AR2009081202575.html?referrer=emailarticlepg
inthewoods
Is there something that happens when you get old that you suddenly become dumb as hell? Seems to be the assumption and experience by everyone I know – talk to old people, they say some crazy-ass shit that isn’t based on anything. And the response from everyone is just as funny – “well, they’re old”.
Stop Medicare
@Michael: That’s the spirit!
Va Highlander
@Napoleon:
I liked a pithy quote from Al Giordano, seen earlier today:
Comrade Tudor
That’d be the very sad Conor Oberst
kay
@John Hamilton Farr:
“IMO Obama made a monstrously bad calculation by not presenting a stripped-down, bare-bones basic universal health care bill of his own and then letting Congress festoon it with the usual bullshit.”
It’s what they do, though. They did it with stimulus, and energy too. I don’t know why they think this approach is a great idea, but it’s clear they think this approach is a great idea.
gypsy howell
@Napoleon:
And all this “11th dimensional chess” bullshit is sounding oh-so-much like Kerry’s whole “keeping our powder dry” strategy in the 2004 campaign.
All I remember from that is a whole mountain of unused dry powder after November 2004.
Sweet jeezus, how long have these politicians been living in this country? Don’t they know how it works yet?
and @kay: who could have anticipated THAT would happen, eh?
Martin
I don’t know. The more I watch the town halls, the more I wish the death panels were true. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll miss my parents, but I’m right around the break-even point that losing them might be worth it if it got rid of all the crazy people preventing my kids from having a rational country to grow up in.
Barbara
Medicare will go away and they will be twisting in the wind — if health care reform IS NOT enacted. It will go piecemeal, as more and more doctors refuse to treat people whose good deal from the government leaves primary care doctors high and dry. They will be fending for themselves with providers who give them shorter and shorter shrift as they try to make money with things like plastic surgery and infertility services.
And if they live in a rural area, within 10 years, they will be lucky if there are any doctors or hospitals available to serve them at all within two hours driving distance.
That’s the future of Medicare without substantial reform.
gypsy howell
@inthewoods:
I dunno. I’m 55, and I’m starting to think that after 55 or 60 years, the unending bullshit just drives you bugfuck crazy, and you give up trying to tell crazy from not-crazy anymore.
General Winfield Stuck
I don’t really blame Obama for giving it a go at the bipartisan approach. This is the dudes style and who am I to pan it. But it is rapidly coming time to fish or cut bait.
And after Grassely’s nutty endorsement of Palin’s Death Panel shit, it is now time to cast aside any hope of getting a few GOP votes in the Senate. Obama knows and every dem on Capital Hill knows, that the wingnuts were never going to let government touch their precious cash cow we call our Health Care System, at any degree more than it does now with medicare, which they hate with a white hot passion.
Political Kabucki has it’s place, but is not the game. And as surely as repubs won’t vote for govment involvement, there are a plethora of progressive dems in the House who won’t vote for a meaningless bill, with no PO. This die was cast before the curtain even opened. We have heard a lot about the Blue Dogs, but they are only about 50 in number. There are a whole lot more liberal House members.
Obama’s error and dems in the Senate was letting the Senate Finance committee drag out their non-sense and become THE focus of attention. I suspect the corrupt Baucus and his winger pals were more than delighted they could.
But this isn’t an election year, thank Gawd. And when congress returns and hands are forced, we will have something solid to debate and the largely pre ordained drama will play itself out, and it will come down to Senate dems having the gumption to go it alone and do the right thing, or not.
I really don’t think we are going to get a bill without a strong PO. The House liberals, even though they are presently quiet, won’t have it. So it will be either a good bill, or none at all. Opinions are like A-holes, everbody got one. This is mine.
kay
@gypsy howell:
I actually didn’t figure it out until last night, but, then, I’m not a “political professional”.
Health insurers retain whatever shreds of credibility they have left as honest businesspeople offering a service, WHILE fighting like rabid beasts to retain every advantage.
I think they watched and learned from Wall Street’s initial small blunders. Remember the brief period where we thought Wall Streeters might be over-paid, and some people on blogs said mean things about them, and that made them mad ‘n sad? Insurance titans wanted to avoid all that unpleasantness.
The Saff
@Martin: For the win!
kay
@General Winfield Stuck:
I’m not backing it without a public option. With mandates, and no public option, the beast just gets bigger, and we’ll never be able to regulate them in any meaningful way, because they’ll be in the driver’s seat. We’re not regulating them now. They’ll be 50 million policies bigger.
They grabbed almost 25% of Medicare between 1993 and 2009, and, IMO, are measurably more influential in fighting reform since 1993.
How powerful are they going to be if everyone has to buy a private policy?
The only concession they made is they can’t drop people who contracted with them in good faith, healthy, and paid the premium, and then got sick? That was generous. That’s the whole point of insurance. We’re “forcing” them to comply with the very basic point and purpose of the product they sell? Wow. Poor babies. You mean they have to PAY CLAIMS? On SICK PEOPLE?
General Winfield Stuck
@kay:
Neither will I. Without bringing down costs the golden goose will drop dead in a few years from getting so bloated with profiteering. And I don’t think the liberals in the House, and maybe even the Senate will either.
If you listen to Obama, he has repeatedly said he would not support a bill that doesn’t bring down costs, and when asked how, he has offered nothing but a PO. With occasional tepid retorts about looking at any other proposal that CC’rs may come up with, like the Co-op nonsense.
Democrats control everything, and what we hear for public consumption is largely political theater. It is what goes on behind the curtain that will count when it’s time for a recon. committee final decision and bill, where liberals have the numbers.
After that the House will insist on a good bill and pass it, I think. Then comes the Senate, and who knows about them.
The only reason i’m still optimistic is the fact that health reform is democrats flag ship issue. For both Obama and dem liberals across the board. That means, if this fails, the party will take a broadside from the base, maybe even a fatal broadside. Otherwise, I think it would be business as usual with circular firing squads and nothing would get done on this volatile issue.
jcricket
The third-tier non-intellectual pundits (aka, balloon-juice) are actually much better. They get to the point (such as there is one) more rapidly.
And less stuff about Burke and Oakshotte.
jcricket
@General Winfield Stuck: Me three. A public plan is like Social Security. Something to build on and adjust. Without it, it’s a bunch of regulations that’ll get repealed or watered down or ignored.
If the Dems can’t make this happen now, they can’t ever make it happen. And by it i don’t mean something perfect, i mean reform with 8-9 good regulations and a solid public plan.
jacy
Anybody who watched Angel season four must realize that anybody named Conor is bound to be both a douchebag and pointlessly annoying.
This brought to you from my forthcoming book “Everything I Need to Know I Learned from Joss Whedon.”
kay
@General Winfield Stuck:
I wish I was as confident as you, but I’m not. This was a 2 week full court press to kill the public option, wingnuts, corporate allies, and media, and the co-op idea is just useless.
I live in a community with a rural electric co-op. My electricity costs are reasonable, but the bordering county has some of the highest costs in the country. They’re with a “big fifty” utility.
My co-op did not one thing for competition, although I am a big fan. It’s too small an idea to make a ripple, and it takes cooperation from state and county. I honestly think we’d never have got it done today, in the current lobbyist-friendly climate.
Svensker
I’m glad everyone else immediately focused on the ice cream from space angle. Makes me feel less shallow.
R-Jud
@gypsy howell:
I am 29 and I feel this way. I guess I should’ve done more drugs before settling down.
les
@R-Jud:
Sitting at 61, I’ll say the drugs helped a lot. Now that accessibility is near zero, for a number of reasons, the crazy is damn near unendurable.
Sebastian Dangerfield
@gypsy howell
“You know, if they had just started out with ‘Medicare-for-All’ and actually called it that, you wouldn’t have seniors all up in arms about it. Half these oldsters don’t realize medicare is a government program, but they DO know they like it.
“Sure would have taken the boogie-man out of a lot of this discussion.”
I’m not so sure about that, though it would be great if that were on the table. Reason 1 is that the “Medicare-for-All” notion is the kind of thing that wingnuts started ginning up as the camel’s nose of communism poking under the tent. Listen to “Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine” from 1961 warning that if the socialists get their way and give seniors health care, they’ll seduce all you nice people with this wonderful government program, which is somehow, um, terrible. This idea strikes something deep in the conervative lizard brain that will cause eruptions of crayzee again and again.
Reason 2 is that there is genuine–if totally misguided–fear among seniors that the game is zero sum: If anyone else gets what they have, it will have to come out of their benefits. Andrew Sabl over at Mark Kleiman’s joint made a very compelling case for this as he tried to puzzle out why it is that a lot of folks are willing to believe the “death panels” lie:
I think it has to do with the dynamics of self-interest and self-deception. Some of the most virulent opponents of health reform are the elderly, who already have government-provided health insurance. While some may be too silly to know that that’s what they have, a great many assuredly do know it, and are happy to pull up the ladder behind them. Medicare is already very successful and very generous. Under universal coverage, it’s unlikely to get much better (except for prescription drug coverage, but not all the elderly take a huge number of pills). And it could, for all one knows, get worse. To avoid that risk, better that some youngsters go without.
This reasoning, though, is brutal–too brutal to acknowledge. While we’re a pretty selfish country, “I’m all right, Jack” is not an argument people comfortably make when others’ lives are at stake. But “if this passes, they’ll euthanize me and my friends” is another kind of argument altogether. It’s false, but easy to seize on as a morally comfortable pretext for opposing a bill that threatens one’s self-interest.
Unfortunately, it’s also the kind of emotionally resonant claim that many people will continue to think in the back of their minds is “kind of true” even when they come to know, intellectually, that it’s false. Lots of cognitive psychology shows that people will believe that two plus two equals “four, though some say five.”
That sounds about right to me.
pip
Saw my 72 yo ma today. She’s happy experiencing the grandkids and getting some steroid injections in her neck — not going to town hall meetings and screaming at people, though she could have, were she the person she was not so very long ago. She’s decided that her time is better focused on remodelling her living room and putting together my dad’s memory. It’s quite cool that she put together pictures and news clippings and my dad’s dog-tags and such into picture boxes. They are quite nice and each one is entended to be passed on.
My point, I guess, is that my mom used to be like the seniors on teevee, but somehow, she gained a sense of perspective in the last 5 or so years. Back then, she would have been ranting with the best of them. It’s not that she’s tired, but rather mellowed, finally. She doesn’t even rant about my sister-in-law anymore. It’s made me think for once that it’s not so bad to live in a world with her. And for me, that’s saying a lot.
I think that through this month, there are lots of people at work like normal and older people with a different focus in life that aren’t caught up in this. The town halls just provide a story that was set up to make a slow news month more lively. And that is very wrong.
pattonbt
My mom (71) is a total DFH and not afraid to get up in peoples face about it. She has been forwarding me emails over the last couple of days titled “another ex-friend” which are her responses to all the crazy anti-healthcare email she gets from her random oldy friends. My mom responds to the person and basically says “thanks for the garbage you can fuck off and die now. Cheerio.”. She takes no prisoners in shredding them. Its kind of awesome and scary to watch. I wonder if she will have any friends left soon.
But these healthcare scare emails are vile and you never really could believe that nice little old Mrs Johnson from down the street could be that batshit crazy / stupid / gullible to fall for it. But they do, and it appears to be in large numbers.
Surly Duff
Wow. That whole article boiled down to – “Health care advocates must understand why many Americans, including my family, are ridiculously naive and ignorant of facts.
Good to know.
gelfling545
While these conclusions are, indeed, unreasonable their source is not one amenable to reasonable. For many of these people the unthinkable has already happened. In their worldview no black man, however gifted, could possibly win over any white man, however inept. Now that his HAS happened, even your ice cream scenario seems possible to them.
Surly Duff
@ VA Highlander
Actually, being coherent is optional.
bryan
How odd, coincidental. I came back to this blog for the first time in a month today. Why did I leave? DougJ – Who is this third-tier pseudo-intellectual making more posts than JC?
Anton Sirius
@Surly Duff:
No, actually, it boils down to “Health care advocates must understand why many Americans, including my family, are ridiculously naive and ignorant of facts if they want to make any headway in selling health care reform to those same people.”
Doug’s bastardization of Conor’s column was total fail.
Xanthippas
I do this all the time.