Toucano (1000+ posts) Tue Aug-04-09 10:49 AM
Original message
Why is it so hard to understand?
The resistance to publicly funded health care perplexes me.
My own sister (whom I rarely see since college) is "afraid" of a public system.
She has first hand experience fighting the bean counters at our mother's insurance company whom we spent years fighting for payment of *legitimate* claims.
She knows I was driven to bankruptcy after my appendix ruptured in 2004 and I was hospitalized for two weeks with no insurance. Try shopping around and comparing prices for an emergency surgery.
She accepts that the cost of providing health insurance has contributed significantly to the outsourcing and exportation of our manufacturing base.
Still, she is "afraid".
I get the corporate right-wing attempt to use fear to motivate people to support them. What I can't grasp is how can the imaginary fears they employ can possibly trump the REAL fears people rightly have or should have over the current system.
Are the imaginary fears more powerful because they haven't experienced them, whereas they have become habituated to living with the real fear so it seems less scary?
I marched with this woman in demonstrations against US policy in Central America and South Africa in the 1980's. We boycotted the companies that refused to divest. It really bothers me to watch her change into this pro-corporate, talking-point parroting shill.
But what's worse is that I know she is not the only one. It takes powerful brainwashing to maintain an actual desire to keep a broken non-system of the only industrialized nation in the world that hasn't demanded a public plan.
I don't get it.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6216148The parrot brained primitive will never get it.
Warpy (1000+ posts) Tue Aug-04-09 10:51 AM
Response to Original message
1. Conservatives fear change most of all
even if it's necessary change. They're terrified their lives will be disrupted, that they'll be inconvenienced, that they'll have to learn new ways of coping.
That's how to talk to her, point out that the only change will be in who writes the check to the hospital when she needs care, that the only change is that someone will write that check and she won't be bankrupted if she gets sick.
After all, changing the name on a check she never sees is far less disruption to her life than bankruptcy for health reasons would cause.
Necessary change is not me paying for you to go to the doctor. You're right, we don't want our name on the checks written to cover your lazy ass.
BlooInBloo (1000+ posts) Tue Aug-04-09 10:52 AM
Response to Original message
3. (shrug) What's to understand? Americans are stupid.
Yep, look who they elected president and gave control of congress to. Look at who is educating them, unionized teachers.
marmar (1000+ posts) Tue Aug-04-09 10:55 AM
Response to Original message
5. Because the brainwashing has been thorough......
But then again, if people would take a little time to do just a little research on their own, the myths would easily be disspelled.
Damn the unionized teachers again. A little research and more people might find out the DimRats and the liberal MSM have been lying to them, Do you want that?
