If the government were really trying to impose health care choices on Americans, it wouldn't start with Death Panels. I'd recommend Awareness Panels, in which the Town Hall questioners would be allowed to ask any questions as long they also agreed to answer questions — or at least listen to them and give them serious consideration.
Here are some of the questions I would ask:
- What happens to your wonderful health care coverage if you lose your job?
- Do you know how much your insurance will cost if you decide to continue your health care coverage under COBRA after you are no longer employed?
- What will you do in 18 months if you haven't found a job with health care benefits and your COBRA expires?
- Do you know if you and all your family members will be insurable again if your coverage is interrupted?
- Do you believe that none of these things could ever happen to you or your loved ones?
- Do you believe national policy should be based on your personal situation, beliefs and fears, or should it take into consideration all Americans?
- If you believe your experience reflects the true Americans, should our policy change if your situation changes as described above?
The answers would be interesting. Except for the ones that go "I don't want change because I don't want to lose my FREEDOM!"
*****
Former state epidemiologist Mike Osterholm was on MPR today talking about the nation's flu readiness.
The short version:
We're ready if nothing too extreme happens.
But he's concerned about our vulnerability to the "global just-in-time" economy. That's the system that has left public health to the free market; where companies have not invested in new ways to produce flu vaccines because the financial returns are too uncertain; where vaccines and other critical drugs are manufactured in Asia; where the factories are staffed by low-paid workers who will not be vaccinated and may not be able to come to work during an epidemic; where our stockpiles are on foreign ships sailing to the U.S., not in domestic clinics and hospitals; and where a serious flu outbreak is likely to disrupt this global supply chain — not just for drugs, but for food and other commodities.
*****
Similarly, Dick Armey, the former House majority leader and lobbyist for the pharmaceutical industry, is predicting an October surprise from Obama in the form of “a hyped-up outbreak of the swine flu, which they’ll say is as bad as the bubonic plague to scare the bed-wetters to vote for health care reform.”
The assertion may sound ludicrous, but it dovetails nicely with a view among conspiracy theorists that a sweeping and deadly plot lurks behind the swine flu pandemic. Influenced by the work of a whacked-out Austrian “journalist” named Jane Bürgermeister, some on the far right believe the virus was manufactured by the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and the rest of the black helicopter crowd’s usual suspects, as “part of a long-term plan by the syndicate, who have built large numbers of FEMA concentration camps with incinerators and prepared mass graves in states such as Indiana and in New York to quarantine people and dispose of the bodies of the people who are killed by the bioweapons attack.” This “depopulation” scheme has in turn been linked by conspiracy theorists to the Obama administration’s plans for a “global planetary regime to enforce forced abortion” and sterilizing the population through the water supply.
[...]
Obama and the Democrats in Congress quickly frittered away any populist energy that might have come out of the recession, the fiasco of the Bush years, or the 2008 election. All that’s left are the compromises on top of compromises that they call policymaking, for which no one can muster much enthusiasm. Right-wing zealots, on the other hand, think they are fighting for their lives by standing fast against communism, or the anti-Christ, or both; they’re not only doing God’s work, but also fulfilling their destiny as true American patriots.
— James Ridgeway [h/t Norwegianity]
