It Is Democracy, Not Health-Care Reform, That Is Sick (Ezra Klein)

As Josh Marshall says, we've reached a point in the health-care reform discussion where logic has fallen apart. Consider, for instance, Danielle Allen's op-ed this morning. Discussing the insistence of some that health-care reform will result in rationing and death panels, Allen chides those who respond with an accurate description of the legislation. "One can't answer them by saying: 'These policies won't ration; there will be no death panels,'" she writes. Instead, reformers must detail the "institutional checks that will prevent the emergence" of death panels and rationing.

In other words, the questions reformers have to answer is not "when did you stop beating your wife?" It's "what will prevent you from beating your wife?" Given that there is no such thing as a "death panel," nor any policy provision that would establish such a thing, it is hard to explain the institutional checks that would prevent a "death panel" from coming into being. When you have to explain why your bill won't create death panels, and what will make sure that it doesn't, you've pretty much lost the argument.

The fact that an idea as loony as death panels has found even the slightest purchase in the public consciousness shows how distant the minority feels from our democracy. Members of Congress are terrified of voter backlash and industry opposition.

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What we're seeing here is not merely distrust in the House health-care reform bill. It's distrust in the political system. A healthy relationship does not require an explicit detailing of the "institutional checks" that will prevent one partner from beating or killing the other. In a healthy relationship, such madness is simply unthinkable. If it was not unthinkable, then no number of institutional checks could repair that relationship. Similarly, the relationship between the protesters and the government is not healthy. The protesters believe the government capable of madness. There is no evidence for that claim, which means that there is no answer for it, either. That claim is not about what is in this bill, or what government has done in Medicare and Medicaid and the VA. It is about what a certain slice of Americans think their government -- and by extension, their fellow citizens -- capable of.


http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/08/it_is_democracy_not_health-car.html

"The protesters believe the government capable of madness."

We ALL know the government is capable of madness--we had 8 years of madness, at the hands of these very same protesters. They are afraid that retribution, which they have rightly earned for foisting Boy George and Darth Cheney upon this once-great nation, is at hand.

They know what they have done to America. They fear that America will get even.

The guilty flee where none pursueth.

And who knows? Perhaps universal health care, the end of empire and income equity would be hell on earth for these Flat-Earthers, who have found Medicare, Affirmative Action, anti-discrimination policies, and fluoridation such terrible punishments already.