2 posts tagged “health care”

Big surprise.  I know.  Nobody makes you read my vitriol.

Anyway, so Barack said some stuff in front of a wealthy audience "behind closed doors" in San Francisco, and it's a pretty big deal.  You know what I'm talking about, or else you live under a rock or possibly in the Southern Hemisphere.

Let me start by saying that I'm white, we are definitely working class (though I have a postgraduate degree *sniff*), we make *significantly* less than the median household income in this country, we are married with one kid and two dogs, and we live in a small, religious, Republican town.  For my part, I have almost always lived in small towns, though never in Pennsylvania.

And the thing that makes me bitter is the way the media is talking about what Barack said.  First and foremost is that the "guns, god, and xenophobia" part of it is really taken out of context.  I didn't know that until Joan Walsh wrote a nice little blog entry about it.  If you want to know more of what Obama said, go there.  When you read the whole thing, it comes off *a bit* different, no?

Second, the vast majority of the talking/writing class who are accusing Obama of elitism and being disrespectful to the working class are NOT working class.  So, you live in Manhattan and work for a major news network and have stylists do your hair everyday, and you want to tell ME how I think about what Obama said?  You want to tell ME that I'm being disrespected?  No thanks--I can read, and I can decide for myself if what he said is offensive, OK?  I don't need you, some asshole pundit, to tell me what I think.  Thanks.  Slate ran, like, 4 or 5 pieces about it, all of them blasting Obama but in different ways, all of them assholish.

Third, are they deliberately misunderstanding what was said?  They have to be deliberately misunderstanding this, just to make hay from it because that's what they do.  For example:

To judge from Obama's several statements on the subject, he sincerely believes that working-class whites, lacking the self-awareness to recognize the actual economic origins of their distress, seek relief from their pain by praying in church, slaughtering deer, and making illegal immigrants and imports from foreign countries scapegoats for ills that have nothing to do with immigration or trade. They may not be racists, they may even be sympathetic victims, but they are too irrational to understand their genuine problems and their true interests, which are chiefly economic, a fact that university-educated progressives in big cities and college towns can readily perceive.  Source. 

That is not what Obama said or even really implied.  You, elitist bastard, are putting that whole "lacking the self-awareness" part in there yourself.  The point was not that we quaint Li'l Abners don't know where our misery comes from--the point was that administration after administration, it just keeps getting worse, to the point that we don't believe any administration gives a shit about our situation (and we are *quite* aware that urban Democrats don't) or that we have any power to change the economic situation.  Obama didn't say or imply that we're too stupid to figure out what's wrong in our towns.  He said that when the economic situation is persistently dismal without real hope for a solution, well, people hold on to their traditions and culture more tightly than people whose economic prospects are good. 

Obama furthermore did not state or imply that "Once the Pennsylvanians get some jobs back, they'll change and become as enlightened as Obama or the San Franciscans to whom he was talking"  (Kausfiles).  Say what?  He didn't say this because he didn't say that they were unenlightened.  He said they were "bitter" and by that he meant "angry" not "unenlightened."  He meant they were angry about the severe economic screwing they've got in the past couple of decades.  He has never said or implied that religion is backward or that hunting or other sporting uses of guns are backward or unenlightened.  (And, fortunately for all of us who hate being pandered to, he has also not regaled us--all of a sudden!--with tales of how his grandfather took him behind the barn and taught him to shoot when he was just a little boy--oh, fuck off Hillary.  Just fuck off.)  He didn't say or imply that Pennsylvanians need enlightenment--he said they need jobs or reasonable hope of jobs and economic development in their towns, and he implied that once they have those things, perhaps they won't feel so angry and hopeless. 

What are the real economic differences between the two parties, anyway?  Both seem to support NAFTA, "free" trade, most elements of the Farm Bill, and so on down the line.  Does either party have a plan for bringing decent jobs back to rural America?  No.  Rural people don't typically support welfare, mainly because they think that if jobs are available, it's better to work.  But, it is no great comfort to be asked to give up a factory job that had benefits for a service job that pays half of what you were making and has no benefits, all in the name of the great economic theory people in Washington and the universities like to dream up. 

On the other hand, I've been trying to warn my similarly well-educated liberal-ish friends for a long time that the rhetoric coming from the left was severely and possibly permanently alienating a core set of voters that basically agree with them but get turned off by being called names.  Seriously, check these quotes out:

"This quote and the resulting feeding frenzy are a huge opportunity for Obama to get the attention of low-information small-town voters who are skeptical of him and convince some of them to vote their pocketbooks instead of their culture."  (ah, okayyyyyy...we're "low-information?"  Really?  I consider myself pretty high information, too high most of the time.  And you will probably never convince most of us to vote our pocketbooks over our culture--sorry, but some of us actually care about our culture.)

"Obama spoke artlessly, forgetting that the first law of American politics is: Flatter the rubes."  (And that is from Todd Gitlin, Ph.D. in dumbassery.  Yes, we're rubes, and low-information rubes.  The only thing we can understand is flattery and pandering, which is why NONE OF US are completely irked at Hillary's recent embrace of her gun-related past.  That NONE OF US there is totally sarcasm.  You didn't know rubes could be sarcastic, did you?)

In an essay titled "The Urban Archipelago" a few years ago, the editors of Seattle's alt-weekly the Stranger wrote: "It's time to state something that we've felt for a long time but have been too polite to say out loud: Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America. We live on islands of sanity, liberalism, and compassion -- New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia, Seattle, St. Louis, Minneapolis, San Francisco, and on and on ... And we are the real Americans. They -- rural, red-state voters, the denizens of the exurbs -- are not real Americans. They are rubes, fools, and hate-mongers ... We can secede emotionally ... by turning our backs on the heartland ... We're everywhere any sane person wants to be. Let them have the shitholes, the Oklahomas, Wyomings, and Alabamas. We'll take Manhattan."  (OK.  Deal.  You take Manhattan, and you go ahead and secede.  I will remind you that, while much food is eaten in Manhattan, none of it is grown there.  Perhaps you can import it from the Republic of California, but only if we let you transport it through our territory.  What is this "real Americans" bullshit anyway?  Sanity?  What?  From what I hear y'all have high violent-crime rates, a great deal of poverty and racism of your own, and insane amounts of traffic--that's "sanity" and "real America?"  OK, man, if that's what you want.  Fortunately for us, this deal also means we get virtually all the National Parks and Forests, most of the bizarre roadside attractions that make American roads so great, and all the corn we can eat.  Sweet.  Keep your Manhattan and your Los Angeles--they don't have anything we want anyway.  Also, St. Louis?  Really?)

Yeah, and I haven't even started on the specific comments in which liberals take on gun owners (my penis is so small, in fact, that it does not even exist--and that is exactly why I own guns!  Facile Freud, at your service), trucks (ditto!  god forbid we should find either trucks or guns to be useful tools), child-rearing (I'm going to spank my kid just to spite you!), and, well, it just goes on and on.  Liberals constantly say they are the party of the working class, the party of compassion.  But where is this evident?  Hillary, who once did genuinely show compassion, has become such a cynical tool that she apparently cannot see why someone would care about the sniper fire thing or the Mark Penn thing or that whatever fond memories she has of shooting with her grandpa she consistently votes for gun control, and it is not clear where she draws the line of Enough Gun Control.  For all we can tell of her, she will pry the gun from Charlton Heston's cold, dead hands. 

So, I ask again, where is the compassion, enlightenment, and care for the working class evident?  When was the last time the Democratic party had a really good idea for how to help small-town, working-class people?  ...I'm waiting...  It does not follow that simply because you oppose tradition that you are enlightened, either, so don't tell me that because you support gay marriage, you get an automatic enlightenment badge.  Yeah, yeah, "universal health care," SCHIP, blah blah.  Any rural person will tell you that it's not about welfare systems--people want jobs, they want to keep their farms, they want their downtowns to start looking alive again.  A lot of small towns in the West are organizing community stores as a way to begin the revitalization of the downtown--we're starting one here, for example.  Not that the typical Democrat knows or cares.  And neither Hillary nor Barack is currently offering a health care plan that actually insures everyone, at least not without forcing them to buy insurance that they may or may not be able to afford.  I tell you, we can barely afford ours, and it's cheap from what I can tell (my husband's employer is one of the last great manufacturing employers, I am convinced--seriously, he has all kinds of benefits, they pay well for this area, they are very ethical and organized in all their dealings with their employees.  So I guess what I'm saying is eat more instant potatoes, because that's what they make, and they treat their employees remarkably well, and we are very fortunate.  Eat at KFC because then you're eating my husband's potatoes.  Wow.  That sounds kind of nasty.  Anyway...). 

Yeah, I don't know, but I don't think Obama is the one disrespecting rural voters.  He perhaps did not say it in the most elegant way possible, but at least he has a grip on what the problem is.  It's too bad the media and most other Democrats don't.

(oh, right, I know, our culture is mere nostalgia for a "past that never really existed" and we have no right or justification to want to hold onto it and anyway all country music is shit now.  right.  got it.  blah blah blah.  watch as the democrats shake their heads in confusion after they lose to McCain...just go ahead and secede)

OK, I've been puzzling over the health care plans put forth by Clinton and Obama (and Edwards, not that it matters anymore).  I've read them.  I've read commentaries on them.  And there are still some things I don't get.

How are these requirements that insurance suddenly become universal (in that no one can be denied on the basis of preexisting conditions and so forth) and also affordable supposed to work?  I mean, as far as I can tell, both plans are still working through mostly private insurers--that is, insurance companies that exist to make profit.  I think that a) the insurance companies are going to put up one hell of a fight about that and b) Congress and the courts won't go for it anyway, because requiring companies to do this sort of thing seems like a government intrusion into business that no one will actually approve.

Also, how exactly are we going to mandate (Clinton does; Obama not, apparently) that everyone buy insurance of some kind without also having pretty far-reaching solutions for the growing lower classes?  I understand Clinton wants to mandate that everyone buy insurance but at the same time index the premiums to income--but we're talking mostly about families who are already stretched to the breaking point.  Real wages haven't gone up in my lifetime; we're losing jobs; we're in a bloody recession!  There are already plenty of us who can technically afford health insurance but still cannot actually afford to go to the doctor for simple things like strep throat*.  I don't see this helping that situation, although they claim that they are going to reduce health-care costs at the same time.  But it is not at all clear to me how exactly this is supposed to happen. 

I understand this has been compared to requiring car insurance, which we already do.  Except that there are actually a lot of people out there who flout that mandate because they either cannot afford or cannot get car insurance.  You can require people to do things that they still do not do--I know this well, as I have a 2-year-old in my house.  Paul Krugman is arguing that Clinton's plan, by mandating that all the poor schleps out there further stretch their budget by buying some kind of health insurance, will get us universal health care.  Mmmm, I doubt it.  It will likely get nearly everyone to be insured, yes, but if they still can't afford to go to the doctor when they need to, I don't think it's much of a victory.

I thought--silly me--that the idea behind universal health care was that all people would be covered and be able to afford to actually use the services of health care providers.  Unless Clinton and/or Obama suddenly comes up with radical plans to greatly reduce the already plentiful economic burdens on those of us who exist between the median income and the poverty line, I really don't see this helping very much. 

Am I too pessimistic, or am I missing some key part of their plans?  O wise readers, please tell me it's one or the other (or both) because otherwise, this poo just stinks.

*Last year, we (my family) were in this position.  This year we're a little better off.  The main difference is not that we have more money but that T's employer offers flexible spending accounts (which Hillary does not approve of, or so I hear) that allow us to deposit a portion of each of his paychecks into a special account we can use for medical expenses.  You get a tax break by doing this, but the tax break doesn't actually save us any money because our tax bracket is already a negative percent.  All it does for us is ensures that there is money for medical expenses.  We don't miss the $34 or whatever per paycheck, and then the money is there when we need it.  However, we don't miss that money mostly because we are excessively, obsessively frugal, and I believe a lot of families in our income bracket would miss it.