Are you a conservative health care protestor? Mad as Hell? Not Gonna Take It Anymore? Not So Fast...

A lot of people have been trying to sound a lot like Howard Beale at Congressional town hall meetings around the country lately, telling us how they are “mad as hell” and how “they’re not gonna take it anymore”.

I think they’ve missed Howard Beale’s real point however:

"I'm a human being and my life has value."

These protestors try to sound like Howard but if you listen carefully what they are really saying is:

"I'm important - those people are not."

These protestors are all about self-superiority and discrimination against people they see as different from themselves – they hold a deeply seated belief that they and only they are hard working worthy loyal Americans and that nobody else's life has any value.

Howard believed that we all had value - that all of our lives mattered - not just his own.

The healthcare protestor on the other hand believes that he is being unbearably put upon to help people he deems unequal to himself and unworthy of his support.

To the protestor, universal access to healthcare is the 21st Century equivalent to the racial desegregation of the 1950's and 1960's.

The protestor believes that the world is a zero-sum game where in order to provide healthcare to the poor, the quality of their own healthcare has to go down or their taxes have to go up - just as the racial segregationists of the 1960’s believed that it was "unfair" to force their white children to have to attend school with a black child because it would drive down the quality of their education in order to elevate the quality of the black child's education.

Of course thinking people know better.

The world is NOT a zero-sum game and helping the least amongst us is not merely a Biblical imperative but also good public policy - we are all already paying for health care for the poor in the least effective most expensive manner possible already: the emergency room.

Over 50% of bankruptcies in this country are directly attributable to medical bills in spite of the fact that the vast majority of these bankrupted families were middle class working people with employer provided healthcare.

Here in Florida, Kaiser Permanente estimates that 3.7 million Floridians - 20.8% of our population - has no health insurance. That’s one in five Floridians.

In 1776, the Declaration of Independence declared solemnly that we all have an inalienable right to life - why is that right in the form of affordable healthcare not universally available to all Americans in 2009?


Doug D.
Orlando, FL

The GOP plants in the front two rows will not hear and cannot be reached.
I worry about the more sensible, risk-averse voters a couple rows back who really want to know how they will be affected.

Until they lose their job with benefits and have to work for minimum wage with none.

Or they turn 65.

Then something needs to GD be done soon