Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/01/jimmy-kimmel-save-aca.html
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Watch Jimmy Kimmel's moving monologue about his infant son's heart surgery, and why we must save ACA
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wow. i had open heart surgery when i was 7, and it was a scary thing, very touch-and-go, back in the 70s. i had NO IDEA they could do such a thing now on a literal newborn, hours old. i’m happy it had a happy ending for him. he’s right – no parent should have to go through deciding if they can afford their child’s surgery in the US. it should not be a partisan issue.
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But it is. And we all know why.
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And we all know why.
:raiseshand:
Is it because President Blackman had a (D) after his title instead of an (R)?
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donation is part of the problem , people think that programs like that can work with rich people donating
no need for government backing
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It’s less that than the combination of three other ideas (all of which subscribe to the “greed is good” mentality):
- That the super-rich who own or invest in the medical and/or insurance industries won’t be able to get even more super-rich at the expense of the poor and middle classes.
- That taxes will go up across the board in order to pay for healthcare if it became fully socialized (which the ACA can be seen as the first step towards). Tax increases on the poor and middle class for this will be far less than they currently pay in insurance and medical co-payments, etc, but the rich+ will end up paying more in health taxes than the poor, so you can’t have that.
- The rich will get the same medical treatment the poor do if fully socialized healthcare comes to pass. This means either their healthcare is just as shitty as poor peoples’, or poor peoples’ healthcare is just as good as the rich’s. In a “greed is good”, “the rich are better than the poor” mentality, this is completely unacceptable.
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Yeah, I cried. Too often I resort to cynicism, but not during that monologue.
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The part where Kimmel said that no one wants for anyone to not be able to get their baby the health care it needs because of lack of access to health care … I wish that were true. I had a discussion with someone on Facebook recently about preexisting conditions, and I had mentioned that, without the ACA, I wouldn’t have been able to get health insurance because of a genetic bone disorder I have. Her response? She said that while she felt bad for me, why was that her problem? Why should she pay higher premiums because people like me have problems she doesn’t have? This wasn’t a rich woman, either. She was young, middle class, and white, and she has bought this mythology that she is solely responsible for her successes and failures in life, and she never had any help from anybody. These are the people who voted Trump into office, and voted the GOP in to power in Congress. And you can’t change their minds. At this point, the only thing we can do is outvote them. I hope there are enough of us who care enough to do that.
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Ask her why your premium should pay for her new car when her previous one is stolen, seeing as you never made a motor claim in your life.
They just don’t get it, do they? See my comment on the thread about the Alabama rep who needs to be educated about the concept of insurance and what it really means.
You know, as a European, I’m beginning to suspect that many Americans, if they had it properly explained to them, would consider insurance to be much the same as socialism or communism. Damn those commie insurers!
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We in the US have had it drilled into our heads since early childhood, at least since the 1950s and probably earlier, that communism=socialism=evil, and that private business is always better and more efficient at everything than is the government. I used to believe a lot of that myself, probably until I went to college and got exposed to a lot of other cultures and ideas (and I went to a really conservative school, ironically). I have a genetic bone disorder, and parents who are lifelong Democrats (southern, slightly conservative Democrats, but still), and this anti-socialism brainwashing still got to me to a degree. There’s an ideal in America of the hard working, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, tough guy, who is solely responsible for his own success and never needs help from anyone. While this ideal has lead to a pretty good work ethic, it has also led a significant number of Americans to wrongly believe that no one ever helped them, so why should they help anyone else. This is also why our infrastructure is falling apart, and the whole damn system is going to come crashing down on us in dramatic fashion if we don’t wake up soon.
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Yes. We Amuricans, we’re all alone in this together.
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I am literally on hold with my insurance company right now because I got an urgent letter that my daughter doesn’t have a PCP designated. They just told me the doctor’s office that’s seen her since she was born, and who two weeks ago did her 2 year checkup, no longer takes my insurance. as of 4/30/2017. WTF. single fucking payer already.
ETA: been back and forth a bunch, insurance company saying the practice stopped accepting my insurance, the doctor’s office saying they didn’t, both telling me to call the other back and sort it out. Of course my doctor’s office has little incentive to help me out until other patients start to call in. They accept and manage insurance from 13 companies each company listing between 3 and 10 different 3-letter plan types (I counted on their website). For all that is good and motherfucking holy. Lucky for me I have a cushy office job, but I just cost them 2 hours of productive time, without anything being sorted out (except that I realized my PCP designtaion was also out of date, so my co-pays were $5 higher than they needed to be for the last 2 years. and I need new referrals for all my specialists. Cool!)
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I’m sorry to hear about that. And angry.
(So damn angry, at these members of my society who refuse to acknowledge that we live in, yeah, a fucking society, a collective that’s made so many advances together.)
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Insurance = privatised socialism. A jolly good thing.
(I probably should have stopped at that point, but …)
Yeah, right - “never needs help from anyone”: The wagon-train pioneers crossing the Rockies proved there was no need for any damned commie government roads (but later private railways were just fine). How did the USA ever get ANY public roads? Why have they not all been privatised in the years since the 1950s?
[quote=“danimagoo, post:10, topic:100238”]
it has also led a significant number of Americans to wrongly believe that no one ever helped them, so why should they help anyone else. [/quote]
… or pay any taxes that might help anyone else.
There’s a Catch-22 here, of course, if they HAD been directly helped as a result of taxes (hypothetically), they’d realise the value in such tax and might understand socialism a little better, if only sub-consciously - or at least understand what their tax can deliver. Without the experience of direct help (and with the ignorance of taking indirect things like roads, defence, etc. for granted) of course they object to helping others that way.
Alternatively, in the UK we’ve been paying taxes for the NHS for 70-odd years and we’ve ALL been helped by it, even if indirectly (but I challenge you to find anyone who has not benefitted directly) so we know its value, and understand why helping others in this manner is also helping ourselves. (Local politics, and differences about how to quantify that value and its tax burden, aside. We have our own versions of the fuckwit from Alabama, too.)
I’m rambling (and ranting), and there is a fair amount of cynical sarcasm lurking in this unstructured stream of consciousness (in case anyone not clear and takes me too literally) but it annoys me to hell and back that the so-called leader of the free world / shining light has citizens whose ignorance (and brainwashing) leads to things like parents having to decide whether they can afford to save their child’s life. FFS America!
I seriously being to wonder if armed left-wing revolution isn’t the only way to fix it (which is to say, there is no fixing it, given the left tends generally not to have the arms or the will for violent state overthrow, and too many people who ought to be on the barricades will be lending their NRA privileges to the ruling class/corporatocracy they believe has their best interest at heart).
When they write the history books about the decline and fall of the USA, the roots - the starting point of decline - will be in the 1950s, I suspect, when the “private is good and everything else is a commie plot” meme really took hold.
(Disclaimer. I know less about US history than most readers here, I suspect. Feel free to poke holes. They are probably everywhere in what I wrote.)
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Almost ready to delete my rambling below, seeing as you nailed it much more succinctly.
“IT’S CALLED SOCIETY, STUPID”.
But how to make them get it?
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Think i saw on Failblog an screencap from Facebook where someone was applauding Trump when he was getting to repeal Obamacare. Someone asked if he was insured and he said he was under ACA, the comments after that were going bezerk over how idiotic he was since Obamacare = ACA.
Just shows how much party rhetoric drives peoples minds instead of what policies really mean as far as helping people.
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That’s just what gets me, though, because most Americans have been directly helped. You will find plenty of older Americans who are against single payer because they don’t want the government controlling their health care AND they don’t want to lose their Medicare. The cognitive dissonance should cause their brains to rupture. I honestly don’t get it.
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My parents complain about stuff like that, or on other social topics. They’ll complain over immigrants from war torn countries and how they shouldn’t be trusted and i feel obligated to put them in their place because they came to the US under political asylum from Venezuela, and it would take a few crazy people from Venezuela blowing up a building or shooting people up for my parents to be on the receiving end of the same kind of prejudice they were giving refugees. It’s pretty effective at shutting that down though i have to give them a reminder every couple of months because it comes up again depending on what’s on the news.
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