Good post.  A neighbor with whom I was talking about health insurance/care reform was adamant that she didn’t want HER money to be used to help illegals, poor people who didn’t work, people who weren’t citizens. She wants the world returned to the 1950s when things were cheaper and simpler. She likes her Medicare but doesn’t want other people to get it—after all she worked for it her whole life. Argh!!

All the more, I say, to stop worrying about appeasing them and start just doing the right thing, whether they like it or not.

Exactly. Fuck Chuck Grassley. Why try to appeal to someone who has shown the same depths of ludicrous dishonesty as Sarah Palin?  For crying out loud, attempting to “work with” someone who has made it clear that he’s part of a group determined to kill any meaningful and substantive reform is madness.

I like to think about John Rawls (“Justice as Fairness: A Restatement”). To boil down a complex body of works to the soundbite, “Nobody has a right to more than the average”.

It’s the same sort of idea that lets them paint every person opposing America in Iraq as a “terrorist” (rather than, say, a patriot), and justify the torture of anyone captured on the grounds that they must be opposing the US. 

Everyone else not of the conservative tribe, everyone who is different to their own limited understanding, is an Other. They are not to be understood or identified with; they are to be acted on to achieve the conservative’s own goals.  They cannot be conceived as belonging to a group in common with the conservative.  Thus, liberals are not Americans, because conservatives are Americans.  You should not have to pay for brownish immigrants, because there is no connection between you and they. The Iraqis will welcome our troops, and if they don’t it is because they are defective - wicked and criminal.

They want health care access to be a privilege, a marker of class status.

To the wealthy, it’s a class marker. To the slightly less wealthy, it’s more like a Calvinistic predestinarian index of virtue manifested either in good health or good insurance:

It’s fascinating to watch well-educated secularists who recoil at the Protestant obsession with personal virtue, prosperity as a cardinal sign of election by God, and total responsibility for one’s own salvation turn into fire-eyed, moralizing True Believers when it comes to the subject of Taking Responsibility For One’s Own Health.

The number of people who say that they don’t want “the bums” or an undifferentiated “them” taking “their healthcare”, assuming it to be a zero-sum game, make me very sad.

While it’s true that there are private wards for certain medical—with the same consultants working in their private hours, part of the founding deal to get them to participate in the NHS—the maternity wards and the casualty department really are a reflection of Britain from top to bottom.

Someone in the Salon comments makes the point that the UK (and all of Europe) “had the shit bombed out of it” during WW2, and that the Blitz mentality—we’re all in this together—informs the structure of their health and welfare systems.

In contrast, the continental US remained untouched, the GIs came home and got their healthcare and benefits, and the rest of the country used its intact manufacturing base to make TVs, fridges and big chrome-finned cars.

Britain has a clearly-defined—and often irrelevant—class of nobility, while in the US we have unacknowledged overlords with zero sense of real social responsibility that we’re supposed to protect and defend at all costs.  Sometimes I wonder if it doesn’t make more sense to designate some upper-crust figureheads and then get down to the business of governing for those who clearly don’t make that cut, given that hierarchy does seem to be the primitive default setting in human social organization.

he idea that a 14-year-old immigrant might get service first because she needs it more, and that there’s no way to pull rank?  That’s the sort of thing that keeps the nutters up at night.  When we say that the protesters are fundamentally racist, this is what we mean.

I would venture to say that because Britain has much clearer class divisions, people feel less need to have their asses kissed in the hospital because they have other status markers available when they want to pull rank in other parts of our lives.

They want health care access to be a privilege, a marker of class status.

This is where the contrast with the USA comes in. With so few clear markers of status and the possibility, for the middle class, of falling down the status totem pole pretty hard, they look for possible outlets where they can assert and declare their status, and health coverage is one of those. Having a job where the provision of health insurance is assumed is a sign that you’ve “made it.” If everyone has that, then you’ve taken away one of the few things that allows the middle class to show that they’re “the right kind of people.”

The thing is that I don’t know what the solution to this problem is. Telling those who resent the idea that everyone else could have access to health coverage just like they do to “get over themselves” is satisfying, but I’m not sure it will do too much good. Over the past 20 years we’ve been trying to convince everyone to “celebrate diversity” in order to get the public to enjoy the fact that we’re all Americans stuck with each other in the same country, but I can’t say that public service announcements are a policy solution. We could find other outlets for which people can assert their class status, like regional accent, but I think that the southerners would resent that (unless the southern accent became the “upper class” one). There’s always the old class standby of straight teeth, but that can be solved with money, and the thing about social status markers is that if can buy it with the simple application of money, then it’s not a “real” status marker.

I feel sometimes like our entire post-WWII (or even post-Civil War) social policy has been about forms of therapy to make middle class conservative white people feel better about themselves if we’re going to help everyone (including, but not limited to, them) out.

I so wish people would quit making this a racial issue. I don’t think it’s about race so much as “We have ours, and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves!”

I would like to agree with you, but it’s long been apparent to me that if you dig for the roots of just about anything in this country that’s really fucked up, you’ll find racism there. It’s our original sin.

The way to solve this problem is to create a coalition large enough to ram it up the asses of those who don’t want it.

There will always be assholes.  The challenge of any system is not to dispense with them, it is to marginalize their ability to asshole-up the system.

There will always be assholes.  The challenge of any system is not to dispense with them, it is to marginalize their ability to asshole-up the system.

And then there’s our system, which maximizes it. As it was designed- by Southerners no less!- to do.

Comment #15 states: “The way to solve this problem is to create a coalition large enough to ram it up the asses of those who don’t want it.”

Being a slow Saturday, I went to census.gov and started roaming the site. I wanted to see if the raw data there would give me an idea of just how many “asses” would need to be rammed. I won’t share my alrorithm just yet because i don’t want to bias anyone else’s methodology, but I’ll tell you that working with just the data sets there and my own opinions, I estimate we are talking about 67 million rammings that need to be done. Any other guesses? Given that the estimated population of the US is 307 million, it doesn’t seem like an impossible task!

I so wish people would quit making this a racial issue. I don’t think it’s about race so much as “We have ours, and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves!”

We’re not the ones making it about race, though.  I’m with Amanda; I don’t see the point of refusing to call out racism when people are being racists. 

I know they don’t like being called racists.  They think it’s worse than actual racism.  They are wrong.

And they are racists.

Are all of those opposed to health care reform racists?  No.  But a big chunk of them are, and it shouldn’t be ignored.

Get it all in the sunlight.  Only way to burn it out.

Oh it’s racism alright: the other, the THEY who don’t deserve healthcare. Why else all the fuss about the supposed illegal aliens who will benefit (but don’t in any of the bills discussed.)

Although it’s a bad idea to have anyone in the country without the option of healthcare, that was a sop thrown to the racists.

But unless we fight for it, none of us will have true healthcare.

In five days, FireDogLake and partners raised nearly $400,000 for 60 progressive members of Congress who agree to draw a line in the sand over a public plan.

An object lesson for Republicans, Blue Dogs. You, too, can offer carrots to these progressive politicians at ACT Blue:

http://www.actblue.com/page/theytookthepledge

What we have now, by and large, is segregated health care. And even when people won’t admit that, they know it. Anyone who has spent time in a private hospital (blue carpets, single rooms, quiet corridors, clean smell) as opposed to a county/public hospital (older buildings, over crowded, institution-like tile floors, beige walls, noisy, bustling) can see that there is both race and class segregation in our health care.

I remember being in a downtown public ER waiting room at midnight while my roommate was being treated for minor injuries after a car accident. His mother was there, too. And she does not frequent downtown very often. She was visibly and VERBALLY disturbed because there were black people milling around and I literally wanted to crawl under my chair. I finally whispered to her that she needed to shut the hell up. Of course, she took this as a safety precaution against the dangerous sick brown people in the waiting room, not as an indication to stop being so fucking racist and rude.

I think this is exactly what people fear. More than anything else, this is about segregation. And people don’t want integrated health care. And Caren is right. The sooner we expose this for what it is, the sooner we can shed light on it and shame it into submission.

I so wish people would quit making this a racial issue.

I agree, but you make it sound like the liberals are the ones making this a racial issue.  We’re not.  Pointing out that conservatives are motivated by racism is no more making this racial than pointing out that water is falling from the sky is making it rain.

They don’t want racial minorities and people without means sharing spaces with them, and especially not when they’re sick and being reminded that they’re the same flesh and blood as everyone else.

Interesting that American society which is supposed to be “classless” has more separation than Britain in many respects.

John Rawls also states in his Theory of Justice that in his view, ” each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override….Therefore the rights secured by justice are not subject to political bargaining or to the calculus of social interests”. Each of us has a right to humane, easily accessed medical care. I would argue that it is an issue of justice and that to deny care based on ability to pay is a violation of individual rights. Once could also argue that failure to provide national health care places an undue burden on individuals AND society. I’d love to see the SCOTUS have to rule on a case like that.

The fear of having to share health care services with people of color is pervasive and corrosive. One of the worst examples is in Chicago.

About six years ago, Cook County Hospital was completely rebuilt (and renamed after the political hack who leveraged the deal) at a huge expense to county taxpayers. It was done even though the area was studded with hospitals with 30% or more empty beds. It was done because those hospitals did not want poor black people in those beds.

Now, there were other factors, such as the late payment and meager fees of Medicaid as administered by Illinois, and the desire of said political hack (whose son now has his office) for lots of patronage jobs. But racism was and is the rock, or I should say the sand, on which this monument to medical segregation was built.

Caren, you live in Chicago, right? What do you think about this?

The folks who oppose health care reform who are NOT racist are those who profit from the current fucked up system.  They are those who are already so rich that a health care crisis won’t bankrupt them.  They are those, like our Congresscritters, who posess wonderful health care and don’t understand that the degradation in coverage that most of us face is headed their way as well.

Someday, if nothing changes, insurance will simply be a discount card.  You will pay high premiums, but nothing will be fully covered.  You’ll be better off, since the rate for uninsured will be double or more just as it is now, but you won’t be able to have an annual physical for a simple co-pay, or a simple copay that’s less than $200.

For people to whom $200 is no big deal, there’s no problem.  For the rest of us?

Now, the Venn Diagram of the profiteers and rich overlaps with the racists, how much I’m not sure, but there’s definite overlap.

As for the people screaming about keeping Gov’t away from Medicare?  If it were possible to speak to them reasonably, the nonracists would be for reform, properly explained.  But the profiteers find it much more…profitable…to spread misinformation and terrify them.

Don’t forget how much money Baucus has received from the insurance lobby already.  Congresscritters are getting millions, which makes it profitable to them to keep the status quo.  Their rich corporate overlords stay rich and will continue to pay them while their platinum Federal coverage protects them from the harm they are allowing.

  The idea that a 14-year-old immigrant might get service first because she needs it more, and that there’s no way to pull rank?  That’s the sort of thing that keeps the nutters up at night.
Esp. if she’s a scary brown Muslim with a “bastard” child. Seriously, you nailed it with this post. Also, the NHS covers abortion.

Each of us has a right to humane, easily accessed medical care. I would argue that it is an issue of justice and that to deny care based on ability to pay is a violation of individual rights.

There’s another consideration here, too: whose fault is it that X random person doesn’t have the ability to pay?

For all that the conservatives yammer on and on about welfare and laziness, we have a significant problem in this society about fair wages for lower-skill-level and menial jobs.  We value the work provided enough to have it done, but not enough to compensate fairly the people who do it.

The difference between minimum wage and living wage is this century’s company store.  And the society that is crying socialism when we consider providing them with healthcare is the same society that decided that’s an acceptable way to use people’s labor.

All the more, I say, to stop worrying about appeasing them and start just doing the right thing, whether they like it or not.

Agreed 100%.  When Chuck “they’re gonna pull the plug on grandma” Grassley starts saying that a bill will only be bipartisan if it can get 80 Senate votes, it is time for Max Baucus to dislodge his firmly embedded head from Grassley’s geriatric rectum and see the light.

The Republican were not, are not, and never will be in this to try to create “good bipartisan legislation”.  Jim DeMint has probably been the stunningly most honest GOP Senator in this whole thing (and biggest asshole), because at least he came out and admitted that the Republicans only real goal is to try to kill healthcare for the purpose of crippling Obama’s presidency.

They don’t give a fuck about pulling the plug on grandma… this is a naked grab for power, and fuck the hundreds of millions of Americans who are being hurt in the process.

Fuck these people.  And goddammit President Obama, stop licking Chuck Grassley’s ass with complements.  You aren’t helping yourself, or us, when you do that.

I recently had an email exchange with some distant cousins about health care reform. They’d been sending me constant rightwing crap and I sent them back my somewhat blistering liberal take on this matter. They responded with some pearl clutching and then this—‘maybe we’re tired of seeing our taxes go for welfare mammas who don’t even have to pass drug tests like any employee has to…. Chicage and IL are full of Crooked Thug Politicians and many are in DC serving in this administration.’
Is that racist code language pray tell?
I think you have hit the nail on the head Amanda

The folks who oppose health care reform who are NOT racist are those who profit from the current fucked up system.

I disagree with the premise that those who are fighting healthcare reform sheerly because of naked profit motive are not themselves racists.

I understand that you mean that what drives them first and foremost is greed rather than racial animosity, but it the fact that are so willingly capitalizing on the rabid racism of others as a means to achieve their ends that makes them, in fact, racists.

Someone who willingly stokes the racist fears of others to achieve their own ends is a racist, even if they claim to harbor no personal feelings of racial animosity.  Racism isn’t only a mindset, it is also a weapon.  Racists are people who have the mindset, but also people who capitalize on the mindset as a weapon for their own profit, by stoking those racial fears in others.

I’m sorta fascinated by this discussion because when our first kid was born severely premature we ended up at a public hospital that pretty much matched Amidon’s description. There was our kid in the NICU, there were the working-class white and black kids, there was the kid with the poor teenage mother and the dad who didn’t get to see his kid because he wouldn’t wash his hands in front of his friends, there were the other professionals whose kids needed some time to sort things out… And they all got the same obsessively excellent care.

Of course, this hospital is something of a special case, because it serves a poor urban corridor backed by insanely rich suburban/exurban hinterlands that have too low a patient density to support a really serious hospital by themselves (they’ve got boutique hospitals, private clinics, one of the most expensive drunk tanks in the known universe, but if you’re really seriously sick you end up at the urban hospital). But it’s not unheard of. I think a big part of the segregation in health care, like the segregation in schools, is by geography, and it’s a blessing to this country that in some places that just doesn’t work.

I also think that a lot of people who support the current screwed-up health-care system are like the dupes who support the current screwed-up economic system: the folks at the top of the ladder have sold them on the idea that any improvements for the folks at the bottom of the ladder are going to come at the expense of the people on the next rung up. And the skin-color representations are just a symptom of out pervasive racism, not particular to this issue.

I also think that a lot of people who support the current screwed-up health-care system are like the dupes who support the current screwed-up economic system: the folks at the top of the ladder have sold them on the idea that any improvements for the folks at the bottom of the ladder are going to come at the expense of the people on the next rung up. And the skin-color representations are just a symptom of out pervasive racism, not particular to this issue.

As I’ve said many times before, one of the biggest reasons our racial issues are as fucked up as they are is that they so tied in with social class.  In the United States, white = middle class until proven otherwise, and black = lower class even if proven otherwise.

Ta-Nehisi Coates (the best blogger at the Atlantic, IMO) pointed out a couple of weeks ago that racism has never just been about race, it’s also always been about class:

In the South you had this black middle class that always had to be deferential to the most poorest white person in the world. The prospect of losing that deference, of already being lower than the white aristocracy and now also being lower than a class of blacks too, wreaked havoc.

For a lot of people, that’s what it is—they’re afraid that they’re about to be kicked to the bottom of the heap, and I can’t say that they’re irrational for thinking it.

Mnemosyne:

True enough. If the people at the top can figure out how to extend (minimal) benefits to the bottom by kicking the folks on the second rung down, they’ll do it in a heartbeat.

On earlier recent Pandagon threads I’ve mentioned a letter that CS Lewis wrote toward the end of his life, after his brief marriage to Joy Davidson ended with her death by cancer, where he ruefully and with some embarrassment confessed that actually the British National Health system (which would have been pretty new then, in the early ‘60s) was a Godsend. He was embarrassed because he, as a reactionary, had been witheringly contemptuous and apocalyptically fearful of any such socialistic thing for some decades.

I believe I saw this in a book published in the early 1980s, which IIRC was simply titled “Letters to Americans” or some such. I saw it before I left home for college, at the Tyndall Air Force Base library in Florida, so this would have been 1983 at the latest; I believe the book was new in print then as I recall glancing at it from the New Books shelf.

This is all so tentative because I just did a Google search for “CS Lewis Letters” hoping to find it, and came up empty.

It’s significant that it was a “Letter to Americans;” the Americans in question may have been relatives or friends of Joy. Whoever they were, Lewis was responding to their concerns about the wicked socialist National Health having presumably failed to care for Joy properly—and Lewis assured them they did the best they could, and he shuddered, based both on his general knowledge of medical costs and the sorts of concerns his American correspondents had about the supposed nightmares of public health, to think how bad it would have been for the two of them had he and Joy faced her terminal illness in the USA. The fears of his correspondents overseas were of course stoked by the rants of people just like him.

I also tried to track the book (and perhaps even an actual cite) down by Googling “CS Lewis National Health.” Guess what—no hits on this letter yet. But lots and lots of rightwing pundits, Christianist and otherwise, citing Lewis’s antisocialism, notably the evils of the “National Institute for Co-Ordinated Experimentation” in his novel That Hideous Strength. In other words, the Blimpish fantasy fears live on, but his honest reality-based experience and recantation is completely forgotten.

Perhaps someone else here has read this letter, and can maybe cite it? I’d probably have better luck at Slacktivist, but I am a mere lurker there. And some of us here are also active Slacktivites.

I’m not sure if this is the letter you mean, Mark, but I found this quote from a letter of his by searching through “The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. 3” on Amazon:

What you have gone through begins to reconcile me to our Welfare State of which I have said so many hard things.  ‘National Health Service’ with free treatment for all has its drawbacks - one being that Doctors are incessantly pestered by people who have nothing wrong with them.  But it is better than leaving people to sink or swim on their own resources.

http://www.amazon.com/Collected-Letters-C-S-Lewis-Cambridge/dp/0060819227/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251029519&sr=8-1

There’s also another letter to the same woman the year before stating, “What a pity you haven’t got our National Health system in America.”  Those may not be the letter in question—your account does make it sound longer and more involved—but they certainly indicate a change of heart on the NHS on his part.

Normal fear and anxiety in the emergency room + racism = UGLY.

The racist white wingnuts probably think that they should be seen (even for a minor problem) ahead of the black guy who got shot in the chest and who (in their minds) is probably a criminal.

Emergency room triage is the one place where race does not, should not, matter.

There’s a collection called “Letters to an American Lady.”  Is that what you’re thinking of?

Coming from the Uk the USA this was the first place I ever felt working/middle class division. I’d very occasionally run into a “very upper-class” prejudice back home but never a clear line between middle and working class.

Unless you go looking for it (and to do that you have to actually go an interact with the 1% of our population who considers themselves upper class) you do not get a feel of any form of Middle-class and working-class division in the way you do over here.
Partially this is a result of free university education being available to all in the 50 years after the 2nd world war. Even with recent funding changes an undergraduate degree still only puts students in roughly £10,000 of debt which is covered entirely by incredibly reasonable government sponsored loans. This means that people from all classes have been mingling at universities for 60 years happily, breaking down class divisions all over the show. We have had doctors and lawyers from working class backgrounds, which has lead to a gradual fading out of hereditary class.
In the US I have encounter this idea of hereditary class, working class children do not think they will go to University or aspire to be a doctor or lawyer. Middle classes who want to ensure this stays this way; that they can see where the class divide is and make sure they are on the right side of it.
Just like Britain there is a 1% of upper class, but really that’s not what any of this is about.

Of course we, like the USA and all developed nations it seems, have an “underclass” of people below the poverty line and off the radar, but that is a social problem inherent in our societies and how people approach dealing with that is one of the major differences in our national cultures.

Thank you, #36: trollprincess on 08/23 at 04:23 AM, that’s the quote, and #38: Ellid on 08/23 at 05:32 AM, that was the book.

I had actually managed to find the book by limiting the search to “CS Lewis Americans,” and that located a Google Books link that included much of the text, but not the particular letter I remembered. I didn’t realize one could search in an Amazon selection. Trying it myself has led down interesting pathways—using the word “Welfare” as the key shows how hyperbolic he was against the “Welfare State” in 1952, turns up these revealing letters of the late 50s about Joy and Americans left in the lurch by our private “system”—but also that he persisted in his philosophical stand against the Welfare State despite his grudging admission that it had not been so bad, in fact a positive good, in his personal experience.

I found some related quotes in the Google books selections of Letters to an American Lady but when I tried to post them last night, for some reason or other Pandagon wouldn’t let me submit it. Or Blaspheme it either.

Right now I’m reading through his 1958 essay “Willing Slaves of the Welfare State.”

Sure would be nice if anyone with power was listening.

Are all of those opposed to health care reform racists?  No.  But a big chunk of them are, and it shouldn’t be ignored.

Yes, but when AM says that the protesters are ‘fundamentally racist,’ that doesn’t jibe with your measured statement.  A lot of those folks are simply selfish or deluded, and are focused mainly on class.  Where racism comes in is that the predominant image of a poor person, at least in their minds, is that of a minority.  No more vitriol can be spent than that directed towards those a half-rung lower on the socioeconomic ladder, therefore you have lower-middle class blowhards petulantly hollering about the undeserving looting their stash, even if many of the protesters can’t afford health insurance themselves.