sigh....

From June 2014. Letting poor people just die off will surely teach the rest a lesson.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/06/indiana-gop-candidate-no-one-has-the-guts-to-let-poor-people-wither-and-die/

And then, he defended his comment.

http://posttrib.chicagotribune.com/news/porter/28000445-418/gop-house-candidate-defends-facebook-comment-about-poor.html#.VMZmTC67nLU

The good news is that Dem Chuck Moseley defeated him.

When, O, when will Democrats learn that going left in a red state like Indiana is electoral suicide? After all, Obama only won it once, after many years of going all red in Presidentials.

There is no end to how easily people who don't focus on politics can be fooled.

Someone who earns a living driving a shuttle between Massachusetts General Hospital and its satellite neighborhood health centers asked me in 2012 who I was voting for for President. Then, she started dissing Obamacare, on the ground that no one wants government providing health care.

I pointed out that it was not about government providing health care, but about health insurance. Also pointed out that this driver's shuttle was filled all day long with people on Medicare, on state and federal government provided employee health insurance and on privately provided health insurance and none of them were getting health care from government. Rather, they were getting it from one of the highest rating hospitals in the world.

She semi-nodded. I am not sure she got it. Even though some part of her knew that what I said was true, she still seemed to feel that I must be wrong.

Nothing the government does will be 100% effective so yes, this is a straw man of 'Burning Man' proportions.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You should never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

[hr][font color="blue"][center]You should never stop having childhood dreams.[/center][/font][hr]

How does the government ensuring that only the very wealthy can obtain healthcare equate to freedom? How about having freedom from disease to the greatest possible extent for all people? How how about freedom from hunger and freedom from the abusive and exploitative tactics that asshole employers use everytime they can? How about the freedom to get an education without having to worry about being financially wiped out? How about freedom from the political/societal/environmental destruction the sociopathic greed of the very wealthiest is imposing on the rest of us?

You expose the straw-man nature of the argument very well.

By labeling everyone they deem as unworthy and undeserving as moochers, leeches and parasites who should be terminated, this writer is spouting the latest version of the old Eugenics Movement. There's something chilling in reading that deranged bit of conservative wisdom.

I imagine this is what sociopaths sounds like; choosing a preventable and horrible, lingering death is the preferred choice over healthcare. I need to wash my eyeballs before the next 'normal' GOPer lacking any sense of moral responsibility or social conscience tries to drag the next perversion out of the dank cellars of the John Birch Society and twisted teaching of Ayn Rand.

this was addressed 200 years ago
By jonathon swift in his epic a modest proposal

http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html

come out and actually say what they mean: It's time to kill off the underclasses. They're getting very close to that already and it has always been the tenth-percenters dream: Liquidate the "useless eaters."

Nazi-like.

they don't really want the underclasses to die off.

They are clearly planning the return of slavery.

They want a similar arrangement without the strings of actual ownership, best to toss the wage slave a couple of coppers and let them figure out how to eat and find shelter and replace them with no purchase required if they don't maintain production instantly.

They already have working models of this in Vietnam and India and are aggressively moving in the same direction in the first world, particularly here in the good old US of A.

Independent contractors will segue nicely to day wage slave. Human property would take on the obligations of a pack animal or a tractor and capital isn't up for all of that.

I'd just call what's coming a different flavor of slavery.

I had day surgery last month, the total bill was nearly $50,000. It worked out to about $8000 per hour. Luckily, I am insured, therefore the actual amount paid by the insurance company is something like $9000.

Without insurance, the "revered doctor patient relationship" asymmetric though it is (pay what I demand or die) would have bankrupted me.

From the WP comments section on this article:

"Conservatives are never more sociopathic than when they are pretending to be rational."

than politicians can't have it either.

A belated welcome to DU, Madmiddle!

the Democratic line of $10.10 after completing 90 days at "welfare" levels. They would just have to "slide by" at what they have graciously legislated as our "overly generous" safety net. We'll see what they come up with for shelter with the Section 8 wait times for their districts and states and safety and availability of emergency housing.

While I don't really like term limits I feel comfortable with regular recertification of this requirement with a 3 month period (one month at "welfare" level two at the minimum wage at the end of the next session of Congress after passage) after either two terms in the House for each subsequent Senate term.

the new "tough love".

That some of us simply have to die as there are not enough resources and even if there are, if you dont deserve help you wont get it, etc.


I had a teaparty optician tell me that we have to just accept that there isnt enough health care to go around to everybody, and that some will have to die or suffer as a result.

He said it in a very compassionate manner, prefaced it by saying he wasnt necessarily against ACA or similar, BUT, etc...etc

What the airbag refuses to admit, however, is that the trade-offs of lives saved vs. the costs/mandates of the ACA had been processed and debated, and the decision was that IT WAS WORTH IT!!! For fuck's sake!

Also, his comparisons between ACA cost/benefit and things like "...then why don't we reduce the speed limit to 10 mph to save lives..." are wholly nonparallel ones.

If he thinks the lives saved by ACA isn't sufficient to justify it's costs, then how the fuck can he justify the TRILLIONS we're spending on homeland security-invasions of privacy-TSA body cavity searches-NSA spying and all of the other sacrifices of the new American security state, as balanced against the few hundred (if that) lives per year that would be otherwise lost to terrorism?

Reductio ad absurdum fallacy: "if the government really cared about keeping people from dying, the speed limit would be 10 miles per hour. The speed limit goes much higher than 10 mph, so therefore the government also should be fine yanking health care from millions of people." By this logic, if the government really cared about keeping people from dying it wouldn't let new ones be born. Soon after, there would be no more deaths.

Straw Man fallacy: "Should society have as its goal that the government prevents all deaths from any health-related ailment other than natural causes associated with ripe old age?" Who's making this argument other than Mr. Strain? Conservative propagandists are masters of logical fallacy. There is no other way they can posit their soulless arguments without revealing the pathology behind them. People like Strain traffic in logical money changing. They should be laughed out of the temple of reason.

Using the same logic, If the heirs of the wealthy go broke because they didn't Inherit all of the estate, that's OK too.

"Big deal, they're dying. They don't matter anyway."

Last edited Tue Jan 27, 2015, 06:21 PM - Edit history (1)

the Conservative dick says: "I doubt Obamacare supporters would argue for a society that spends half or two-thirds of its national income on health care in an attempt to ensure that every person with a treatable disease or injury avoids death."

by which he is insinuating that that is exactly what Obamacare supporters are willing to support. This is of course utter conservative bullshit. Obamacare, Mr. Conservative dick, Strain, is entirely about getting a better return for LESS expenditures for adequate health care - for the nation as a whole. This is a worthy goal as before Obamacare our healthcare system was the most expensive in the World (about double the average per capita expenditures for OECD nations) yielding barely mediocre results - for the nation as a whole, relative to OECD nations. After Obamacare, rather than the rapidly increasing costs for healthcare we saw from 2000 -2008, we have seen the slowest rate of increase in healthcare expenditures since such costs have been recorded *. And in 2012 "health spending as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) declining to 17.2 percent, the third consecutive year that health spending has held steady or declined as a share of the economy".{NOTE: 17.2% of GDP is ~20% of National Income which vastly better than the 2/3rds of National Income for Health care expenditures which Conservative dick, Strain insinuated Obamacare supporters are really prepared to spend on Healthcare. (National Income is ~86% of GDP.}

Obamacare's success flies in the face of the insinuation by Conservative dick, Strain that the ONLY way to improve healthcare for the nation as a whole is to vastly increase spending (which would be the case in the former system of profits being more important than healthcare results). Obamacare is improving quality and controlling the costs of healthcare.



* http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/01/06/new-report-shows-2012-continued-trend-slow-growth-health-care-spending

being pro life.