Big, Bad Wolf Health Administrator

The bugaboo that government will stand between me and my doctor is probably the lamest argument that the wingnuts have come up with against bringing Health Care to the U.S. public. I watched Washington Journal this morning with Rep. Tom Price mightily declaring that this was greatly to be feared. A recipient of government health care, he warned about government running our health care, and even failed to correct a caller who claimed the U.S. government would kill old people to solve our economic disaster. At no point did he make any concession to the facts.

Congresspeople and government employees have an excellent health care system that is administered by the government. Social security recipients have the same. None of them have thrown off that yoke and demanded they be subject to the system that fails to care for the U.S. public at large. Only by blatantly lying do the right wing recipients of government health care insist that it will hurt the public to replace insurance interference with the care they get.

Watching the lies and misconduct that the wingers are so comfortable with has convinced most of the public that the government they are part of is not to be trusted. Several sources are claiming that President Obama is losing his standing. McClatchy newspapers, as usual, gets closer to the truth than the other media, by stating the public shows a distrust of government. I would state further that, after many years of being dunned by media that reports lies, and government officials that blithely spout them, the public has learned that much of what it hears is those lies.

As Blue Texan pointed out in her post earlier; "...no one really cares what Jim DeMint or John Boehner has to say about health care. Republicans are having absolutely zero impact on the debate."

If President Barack Obama got anything indisputably right at his news conference this week, it was this: The American people don't trust the federal government.

That's a major reason he's having such a hard time selling his plan to overhaul the nation's health care. Even if they like Obama himself, people just don't think that the government can handle anything big, let alone something as personal to them as their health care.

"I understand that people are feeling uncertain about this. They feel anxious, partly because we've just become so cynical about what government can accomplish that people's attitudes are, you know, even though I don't like this devil, at least I know it, and I like that more than the devil I don't know," the president said.

"So folks are skeptical. And that is entirely legitimate, because they haven't seen a lot of laws coming out of Washington lately that helped them."
(snip)
Several analysts think that he should try for less than a complete overhaul that would extend coverage to 50 million uninsured and create a new government health insurance plan to compete with private insurers.

A more incremental approach, they said, would allow time for the economy to recover, perhaps permit trust in government to build, and then give Obama more room to seek more.

While we all would like to see single payer, and government kicking out the insurance interference with our providers, we may have to take a less desirable product for now. The reason; a sizable proportion of the country is uninformed, and will be swayed by the lies, while much of the media will report the lies as if they were the truth. That will give our undeserving elected officials - who will get more from the lobbies if they betray the public trust - a leg to stand on for voting against us.

Some of us have been joining hands and singing "We Shall Overcome" for a long time. It's in the works. All of us have to keep working at it. Too many are taking the frustration for an insurmountable obstacle. It's an obstacle to overcome, not to adopt as an end in itself.

The only solution to this failure of our system is to keep loudly telling the factual basis for progressive policies, and to fight back against ignorance and cupidity. Here, I try to do that and appreciate your support. Thanks, for your exercise of your intelligence and your principles.