Regarding conservative opponents of single payer or public health care…

Seems the arguments against nationalized care are still solely in the “government is bad” and the poorly informed “it’ll cost me too much money out of pocket,” arguments. Its almost as though they draw obtuse lines between costs and expenditures. They’d rather pay more for a service they can imagine is their own private property, they’d rather sacrifice others in order to maintain this illusory feeling of self reliance, they ignore the basic concepts of health care coverage plans and support systems that limit access and service in the name of profit maximization and worst of all, they use xenophobia, nationalist superiority, a presumed and hostile classism and a faux moral highground to support them. All the while waving the flag, pretending like the cold war is still on and spouting talking points devised by insurance industry lobbyists to try to distort the raw facts regarding health care in this country.

Its as though every man thinks he is an island, with only himself and those close to him to consider. They ignore and actively disregard the inherent social pacts which make us a nation and civilization as well as the affects that the injustices and inequities faced by others have on them vicariously. If they bother to notice these, it is simply to gripe and moan about what lower orders of citizen they are for having not achieved the same level of personal mediocrity and illusory security that they did.

As it is, private health care systems not only leave millions without recourse when faced with illness and injury, but they exploit the needs of our people as a whole by choking off and commercially rationing the care available. Those who receive but cannot afford treatments for medical issues not only drive up the costs of health care for everyone, but also suffer significant personal injury by means of the credit rating and reporting affects that massive unpaid medical costs can create. If the societal danger in this is not enough, it is in due course of reason then to consider what a nation faces when grand swathes of their populations are not only sick and without care, but in debt and impoverished with an increasing amount of obstacles in their way.

People who cannot afford health care or who cannot obtain it through their employers are not lazy, nor are they stupid or immoral or any other manner of description which the modern “holier than thou’ attitude which permeates the self important conservative right wing can come up with. Life and success is not merely a matter of grit, but a combination of circumstance, determination, luck and yes, hard individual work. One cannot pull ones’ self up by their boot straps when they haven’t shoes to begin with. Your horatio alger fantasy of life in America, while apparent perhaps to yourselves, is not a universal truth and while poverty and social-economic inequality is something that can never be completely resolved, the active ignorance of the matter on the part of those against single payer health care or public option reform measures will only make things worse. And if the call for concern over society cannot trump the limited and short sighted self interest which dominates the thinking of some, than they would do well to consider the bigger picture anyway, if only in terms of the rippling affects that continued exploitative inequity can have, which in time will lead right to their own front door.