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Edited on Fri Jul-24-09 01:11 PM by mahina
When Glenn Beck warbled that he "loves his country and he fears for it", like the rest of us, I thought he sounded unstable. But I have to agree with him. I fear for my country too.
We've been getting screwed by the HMOs for most of my adult lifetime, and somehow the propaganda machine and the lobbying machine have persuaded the American people that we like it like this. It's like the Stockholm syndrome gone mass media.
We finally have a real leader who is offering the first tiny incremental step away from a clearly crazy place, and good people all over this country are repeating Fox 'news' lies. Smart, good people. Everybody 'knows' that we can't have gubmint running health care. We don't want to lose what we have. My friends at the gym, neighbors, family, friends who voted for Obama, are generally progressive, are doing the familiar two step that accompanies most of the most appalling propagandists' work. Just like 'we support our troops' somehow came to mean we agree to let our sons and brothers go to war for no good reason, all of a sudden, we are arguing against our own best interests.
What disturbs me most is the mental fog that seems to cloud the discussion. The propagandists seem to have really won when middle and lower income people who don't own stock in the medical insurance industry can't see that profit alone is not the best motivation for a health care system.
I'm a capitalist. The profit motive is just fine with me. But I don't want major decisions about my life and health, nor do I want the lives and health of the people I care about, made based on what earns someone the most money! How hard is that to grasp? Corporations are obligated to produce the most profit possible. That is their sole responsibility. Liability, exposure to lawsuits, exposure to bad press, and other costs are important only in relationship to profit. That's fine for goods, but manifestly not fine for our health!
What is it going to take to wake us up from this stupor?
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