This 70-year-old cartoon made a hell of an argument for single-payer healthcare

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/03/greatest-generation.html

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My chuckle yesterday was a rabid Trump supporter on a mostly right wing forum declaring that Medicare for everyone who didn’t get employer healthcare was the answer. There’s no facepalm that can cover that. I reminded him Obama would have been thrilled to pass that.

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I read “70-year-old cartoon” and assumed Trump had reversed his stance on the issue again.

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But … but … soshalism! The ro-o-oad to serfdom!

Really, though, just when you think Chuck Jones couldn’t get any more awesome…

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I’ve noticed repeatedly of late a common argument against healthcare, education, climate change, vaccinations, and all of those other now-“liberal” things that modern Republicans are against. Apparently these are all “emotional” issues. That’s the euphemism I’ve heard more than anything to insult any law that involves empathy, forethought, or idealism: that wanting these things shows that I’m “weak and emotional”, whereas Republicans are “strong and logical”.

Apparently wanting to be healthy, smart, and alive makes me effeminate.

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Don’t even say the words “emotional labour” around those Gilead types.

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There is of course another layer to this, which is what it means to see the feminine as less than and to use it as a pejorative.

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My old forum I ran, we had a spirited discussion about the whole Hobby Lobby kerfuffle, with regards to “your money” paying for “someone else’s birth control”.

“It’s in the scheme of things like $0.03 per year out of your pocket. Who cares?” I reasoned.

Even one of the guys who wasn’t that far to the right was 100% completely dead set against it, because it was paying for someone else’s personal choices.

Too bad I don’t run that forum anymore–would love to follow up in a few years when they’ve all had enough kids and are faced with paying out of pocket for a vasectomy. But I digress…

These were all guys who had wives and/or serious girlfriends. In one case, a young daughter. It’s about the idea that someone else benefits at your expense. No price is small enough to pay out of pocket, not even the quoted price of 3 cents a week, which in today’s money is really thirty cents. Easily in “Who Cares?” territory for most of us.

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Did any of them explain to you why they saw birth control as more of a “personal choice” than sports injuries, smoking, or obesity, etc?

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Exactly, “weak” and “female” and “gay” and “emotional” are all synonyms for the same thing in that mindset.

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(edited to remove a comment meant for another thread that somehow was put in this post)

The other face palm is that all employees who didn’t have some sort of indispensable-ness to them would immediately be dumped from employer based coverage.

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Yeah we got into that a bit. “Accidents” versus paying for people to have sex was the distinction they Drew. And of course just ignored any kind of “preventative medicine” argument.

On second thought, fuck those guys. I forget at times what that forum was like.

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Dammit, Johnny can’t even read most of that scribbly writing on the chalkboard anymore.

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Johnny nothing. I have trouble, and I was taught cursive in school. (Although I only ever used print because my handwriting is bad enough)

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Somebody needs to explain exactly what insurance is. These guys never think they could be the one who gets sick… until they do. They could also never get hit by a drunk driver, and lightning will carefully avoid them.

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I was sold once they got to the part on immunization.
I had a neighbor die from H1N1. Didn’t get vaccinated… it was new back then and who knew right?

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niiiiiiice

I rather doubt they would make the connection.

One former workplace of mine was populated with right-wing opinion slinging gentlemen, a number of whom rather loudly held that they did not wish to pay for someone else’s personal choices, and that some people simply weren’t meant to live, and it was better to let them die, and Darwinism and all that. One of these opinionated gentlemen had to take off work because his son had a hospital stay due to a peanut allergy.

But that was different, you see.

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Eh, fine, I’ll gladly embrace that label.

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