Cal Thomas is yet another right winger bloviating about how proposed changes to the health care system will bring about tragedy. But he goes a step further than claiming The Government wants to take us out of the decision making process. He insists the evil Liberal Secular (which in the eyes of the RRRW always means atheistic ) Left wants to take God out of the process. Now I don’t recall God being part of any insurance corporation, let alone all of them, but then I could be wrong…
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Underlying it all is a larger question: Is human life something special? Is it to be valued more highly than, say, plants and pets? When someone is in a “persistent vegetative state,” do we mean to say that person is equal in value to a carrot? Are we now assigning worth to human life, or does it arrive with its own pre-determined value, irrespective of race, class, IQ, or disability?
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Human life, regardless of race, class, sexual orientation, gender identity, socioeconomic class, IQ, disability, etc, is indeed precious. It is worthy of being nurtured and protected. What I can’t figure out is why the Right Wing is trying to pretend they’re champions for the needy, and that Liberals pose a great risk to them. It is the RW that persistently denounces and works against increases in the minimum wage that would provide poor people opportunities to support and sustain themselves. They fight tooth and nail funding for social service programs that provide aid to the poor, the disabled, the homeless, the elderly and other people who are less able or unable to care for themselves. They are the ones who insist homeless people are “bums” who want/deserve to be where they are and therefore shouldn’t receive anything. It is they who scream about their precious tax dollars going to “welfare mothers”. It was their hero Ronald Regan who critically cut mental health funding and closed psychiatric hospitals en-masse, literally dumping patients onto the streets.
The bottom line is not the bottom line. It is something far more profound. Our decisions regarding who will get help and who won’t are about more than bean-counting bureaucrats deciding if your drugs or operation will cost more than you are contributing to the U.S. Treasury.
I keep hearing this same refrain. “I don’t want some bureaucrat making my decisions for me”. Wake up guys. Bean-counters are already making your health care decisions for you. They work for your insurance corporation. They determine whether or not a particular claim will be covered and to what extent. Their job is to deny as much as possible so their CEO can maintain his gargantuan annual salary and the company can keep reaping immense profits. Of course that assumes you have insurance in the first place. You may be fortunate enough to have employer-provided coverage, but if you’re not then what? Have you ever tried to purchase your own insurance? It isn’t easy, trust me. Yet another way the insurance corporations maintain their bottom line is to deny coverage to people who have “pre-existing conditions”, which can include anything and everything. They’ll also deny you if you take certain medications or have had particular procedures done in the past. (I, for example, have been denied by multiple insurance companies because I have migraine disorder for which I take Topamax.)So essentially insurance is for healthy people who are unlikely to use it, but rather just keep paying their premiums and making nice profits for the corporation.
Do individuals like Cal Thomas think they’ll always be healthy and under the auspices of employer-provided health insurance? Do they think they’ll never lose their jobs or otherwise be at the mercy of the corporate beancounters whose job it is to deny, deny, deny? Of course maybe they’re just rich enough to pay for everything out of pocket in perpetuity which is why they don’t give a hoot about those who can’t.
The unnatural progression for many on the secular left is to see such a person as a “burden.” In an age when we think we should be free of burdens – a notion that contributes to our superficiality and makes us morally obtuse – getting rid of granny might seem perfectly rational, even defensible. But by doing so, we assume an even greater burden: the role of God in deciding who gets to live and who must die. Anyone who has seen the film “Bruce Almighty” senses how difficult it is to play God.
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Again, it isn’t Liberals who are persistently whining about various people being “burdens to society” and screaming for our precious taxes to be cut so we might not have to suffer as a result. We are not the ones who would allow men, women and even children die in the streets rather than part with a few extra dollars per year. We are not the ones who want the almighty dollar to dictate who lives and who dies. That would be the RRRW. (Perhaps that’s one reason they’re so insistent on having “In God We Trust” stamped on our money–there’s no way they can stamp “In Money We Trust” on their god. )
Reminder to Cal Thomas; it’s not “God” who is currently making decisions about life and death under our present health care system. It is corporate insurance bean counters.
The explosive town hall meetings are indications that Americans are trusting government less and less. So where should we go? The answer is in your wallet or purse. It’s on the money. Right now it is little more than a slogan, but what if it became true: in God We Trust.
Hey, I was right. It is all about the almighty dollar. And here I thought Thomas was claiming God had something to do with it all.