Get Sick and Die

With the kind of militant obtuseness one has come to expect from current-day Republicans an incoming Congressman elected after campaigning against Obama's health care plan is piqued to learn that he does not instantly qualify for government care. “Harris then asked if he could purchase insurance from the government to cover the gap,” a concept he stridently denounced as a gateway to 'socialized medicine'. Unlike the rest of us who would have loved the chance for a public option, Dr. Andy Harris will have to wait a whole month after he arrives in Washington to enjoy his public plan.

Scaring the old and dumb

As reported in the New Yorker, Democrats were shellacked by all the bitter old fogies convinced that the health-care reform would come at their expense:

"since the new law will slow the growth in Medicare spending over the next decade. It won’t actually cut current spending, as Republicans claimed in campaign ads, but between now and 2019 total Medicare outlays will be half a trillion dollars less than previously projected. Never mind that this number includes cost savings from more efficient care, or that the bill has a host of provisions that benefit seniors—most notably the closing of the infamous drug-benefit “doughnut hole,” which had left people responsible for thousands of dollars in prescription-drug costs. The idea that the government might try to restrain Medicare spending was enough to turn seniors against the bill.

There’s a colossal irony here: the very people who currently enjoy the benefits of a subsidized, government-run insurance system are intent on keeping others from getting the same treatment. In part, this is because seniors think of Medicare as an “entitlement”—something that they have a right to because they paid for it, via Medicare taxes—and decry the new bill as a giveaway. This is a myth: seniors today get far more out of Medicare than they ever put in, which means that their medical care is paid for by current taxpayers.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2010/11/22/101122ta_talk_surowiecki#ixzz15SDhi5uf

This is the kind of rank hypocrisy that dooms America to failure. The baby-boomers like Dr. Harris, having sucked the system dry while railing against taxes, have ripped up the social safety net forcing the better jobs flee to countries where businesses are unencumbered by ever-rising premiums. Even the neo-liberal World Bank understands the benefit of benefits:

Financial Crisis Highlights Need for Social Safety Nets

Demand for well-designed safety net and cash transfer programs to assist poor families is growing across the world, as 2009 develops into a year of tough economic challenges-especially for households already hit by the recent food and fuel crises, and for governments concerned that the financial crisis could turn into a humanitarian one, according to a new World Bank report released in February. The report, Conditional Cash Transfers: Reducing Present and Future Poverty, evaluates CCT programs that offer qualifying families cash in exchange for commitments such as taking babies to health clinics regularly or keeping children in school. It finds that these programs where the responsibility for breaking out of poverty is shared by the state and poor households can reduce poverty both in the short and long term, particularly when supported by better public services.

Watching our Washington politicians who appear either willfully ignorant or woefully out of touch, the young are more and more inclined to get turned off and apathetic. In their shoes I would probably say to hell with it. You selfish bastards left me this mess-- get sick and die.