Re: 2020 Democratic Challengers IV: Culling the Herd
Why is socialized medical care so terrible of an idea? We already have socialized defense, which works really well, and it totally state of the art. We have socialized schooling, which would be better off if R's would just let people learn without cutting funding, and we have socialized justice and punishment. All of them work quite effectively.
And the health care system we have right now IS SOCIALISM! When people pool their resources for the greater good, that's socialism. The difference between the "radical progressive pie in the sky" vs. what we have now is that people make a lot of money telling me how I get to use my healthcare dollars vs letting the system to work a lot better.
Just black box what's happening right now- for very many of us, our employer sends money to entity X, and that entity tells me who and what I can do if I get sick. Their ultimate responsibility, by law, is their shareholders. Change entity X to government, who will do exactly the same thing, but with the ultimate responsibility to satisfy the patient. Even with increased taxes, I'll not even notice a change in my take home pay.
How is it that the government is so evil, but for profit companies that make money laundering my money is ok? Dilbert cartoons are not funny just because, they were funny because they resonate a lot of truth. They have mis-management and corruption, too. And for non-consumer items like healthcare, they really provide no benefit.
I literally JUST experienced a perfect personal anecdote which demonstrates eric's type of misunderstanding of 'TEH SOCIALISM," which has been deliberately sewn throughout the working class by the Kochs and others so they keep on cutting their own throats:
I was having a friendly, utterly non-political conversation with an older, very far right coworker (we're talking Dumpy Ground Zero). We are about to move to a new program vehicle and when we do our parent company is changing our charge codes to freeze our pensions to make us cheaper (naturally their profit wrap rate margin will remain the same). It will also negate some
very good legacy medical annuity benefits from a company we ate a long time ago. Because of this, many of our older, legacy employees are going to retire before we make the change so they won't be rooked out of their benefits. I asked my coworker, who is himself quite old, whether he was going to stay on in the new contract vehicle or retire and cash in his annuity.
He told me, "well I already lost my benefits during a former transition" (because he came from yet another company we ate). I mumbled something generic and he followed up with, "yeah, Raytheon did some socialist thing where they told us 'it's not fair that only a few people have this benefit' so the canceled it."
That's what we're up against. A smartish guy with 30 years of work experience doing technical work (he's an engineer) and yet so completely brainwashed by Rush, Hannity, and Fox on politics and economics that he truly believes it's the capitalist who is protecting his benefits and the socialist who wants to take them away.
Until we figure out how to break that cultural programming, which the Plutes spend billions reinforcing through their media, then the very innovations which saved labor in this country and created our middle class (limited working hours, bans on chold labor, OSHA regulations, overtime, retirement, social security, short and long term medical leave, maternity leave) will be resisted by workers when introduced and then, laughably, credited to the very capitalists who fought to deny them.
That's the power of the wealthy to to brainwash people.