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purplecthulhu at 08:24am on 19/08/2009
purplecthulhu at 08:24am on 19/08/2009Amid all the storm and drang about US Healthcare reform, I'm beginning to get the impression that there is an underlying assumption that the 'anti-reformers' have that needs to be investigated...
That is that sick people deserve to be sick, that they are being punished for some moral failing. This could be because they don't eat right, smoke or drink, but I think the deeper unspoken assumption is that god is doing it to them.
It's thus immoral for the sick to be helped by others as this punishment is a correct thing to have happen.
This is a huge misunderstanding of epidemiology and medicine in general.
I think the same assumption is often made in the US about being poor.
That is that sick people deserve to be sick, that they are being punished for some moral failing. This could be because they don't eat right, smoke or drink, but I think the deeper unspoken assumption is that god is doing it to them.
It's thus immoral for the sick to be helped by others as this punishment is a correct thing to have happen.
This is a huge misunderstanding of epidemiology and medicine in general.
I think the same assumption is often made in the US about being poor.
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The more you unpack the notion, the more revolting it becomes.
The American Fallacy
So many of the problems with the US comes from this, and a few other elements of the US Declaration of Independence. Now, if you have studied the more detailed writings of the founding fathers of the US you'll understand that they had a nuanced understanding of what they were saying. Unfortunately, in trying to dumb it down for the masses they (and the same bunch plus a few others who then wrote the constitution) made a number of statements which have been so badly misinterpreted that they've caused severe problems for their descendents (and too often many of the rest of the planet's inhabitants as well). Like writing the Second Amendment in such a way as to allow for teh separation of owning a weapon and being a member of a disciplined trained force (a well-regulated militia). Of course there's also the assumption that words written in 1770 would still be valid hundreds of years later. The US DoI and Constitution are about as valid a source of wisdom now in general as those other documents that are between 1400 and 5000 years old and still being used as an instruction manual for life.
Manuals written by hunter-gatherers, nomads, rural landowners are all equally bad as a prescription for living in the information society.
If all men are created equal then it's their own fault they're poor, sick, disabled, have a low IQ etc etc and they don't deserve any help from their fellow men who obviously just made more of their trust fund, private education, suburban gated housing than the fellow who just didn't take advantage of the inner city schooling, college they couldn't possibly afford, and healthcare they didn't have available from birth...
(*) If it's self-evident you wouldn't need to say it and it would be accepted by most which it wasn't and many of the tenets thus prefaced are still not except by a minority of the world.
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I think, sir, that you have hit the nail on the head. They'd never admit to it, though. When asked if this is the case, I can imagine the indignant no-of-course-nots that they'd bark out. Case in point: a Conservative colleague and I were sort-of-arguing about the healthcare issue on Facebook. She said, I'm sick of the government trying to control my life; I think everyone should just take care of themselves. And I said, but some people can't take care of themselves; this is an issue of basic human rights. And she said...
But who can say what basic human rights are, really?
*blink*
Yeah. She doesn't seem to think the right not to be sick is a basic human right. Which feeds nicely into your supposition.
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You could always try them on 'life liberty and the pursuit of happiness', all of which a rather difficult from a sick bed. And, not that I should be trying to have this argument by proxy, why doesn't she worry about private insurance companies 'trying to control her life'?
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There is, among that people, a small but significant minority (in double-digit percentage numbers) who hate the poor and want them to die.
The 'why' is irrelevant -- it probably differs from patient to patient: in some it's adherence to the prosperity gospel, in others it's racism, in that bunch over there it's insecurity leading to projection, and in this huge subset it's a combination of some or all of the above -- because the real problem is that this group is powerful enough (when backed with the lobbying dollars of the healthcare and incarceration industries) to take a huge shit in the collective pot and force the rest of the nation to drink deeply.
It's enough to make me sometimes wish genocide hadn't gone out of fashion (but then I pinch myself and remember that if any genociding was about to happen, these folks are the ones who'd be handing it out rather than taking it in the neck).
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And to paraphrase an old quote from Usenet about censorship, some people in the US are so deeply opposed to the government controlling their lives that they insist on having unaccountable private entities doing it instead.
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I definitely agree this seems to be a major part of the argument and underlies the concept that people shouldn't have free healthcare because "it encourages them to strive"
Edited to add: I don't agree with the assumption & concept myself, but I think this is what people opposed to free healthcare think. That and they don't want to pay more taxes.
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American liberals seem to mostly try to argue that paying taxes to treat the poor will benefit the tax payers doing the complaining. They seem be too nervous to just point out that they won't actually be net payers (not if they're complaining on the internet, or at least the odds are massively against it).
I suppose they must be afraid of the speakers simply switching to the narrative about how unfair this is on the super-rich, because they "earned" their money. I can sympathize, as I myself have butted up against that worldview, so completely impervious to mine. I don't think the super-rich have earned their money at all, they've just *got* their money, which is not the same thing as earning it. Mainly their money earned itself, making more money through the labor of other people doing the actual earning but not getting the pay.
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Clearly you are a communist :-)
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See also cramming jails full to overflowing with prisoners (and no parole), rather than spending an order of magnitude less on care and rehabilitation elsewhere, that might actually have a chance of reducing recidivism.
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But it should be noted that many express these same (wrongheaded) opinions in the UK, so we are far from whiter than white...
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The current government being amongst the worst in this, too. Never mind about ignoring expert advice they've commissioned themselves where it disagrees with their (or tabloid, which likely amounts to the same thing) prejudices.
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