HR 3200 Blues

Ok, this is a response in part to a friend’s challenge on his blog to HR 3200 supporters, and I’m using the opportunity to rant. First, I direct you to here, to Fact Check Dot Org.  They’re a non-partisan site who call bullshit at both ends.  There’s a lot of factual information about HR 3200, and pretty much all of it contradicts the fear-mongering going on in the current “debate”.

Now, I’m curious what rationing is meant.  Canada, France, and Germany all have far more socialized health systems that what HR 3200 will instigate, and, despite a lot of misrepresentation, they don’t have this rationing.  Hell, we’re the only 1st world country that doesn’t treat health care as a basic human right.  Free market has no business in people’s health.  To quote Zefrank, “scared, emotionally vulnerable people make poor customers”.  Or perfect customers, depending on your perspective.

HR 3200 is not about socialized medicine.  It’s about providing an accessible option to people, like my family, who can’t get coverage otherwise.  It’s about putting some much needed and basic reigns on the insanely out-of-control insurance industry.  It’s about government doing it’s fucking job for once.  The free market is fine and good when we’re talking about trifles and disposable services, but not health care.

Two things continually boggle my mind–

1. The idea that a health care system, still substantially less socialized than those of our peers, is assumed to fail because SOCIALISM IS EVOL.

a. Along with that, the confusion of socialism automatically with the fascist  Nazi state and the totalitarian Soviet state. Just because these groups claimed socialist bases, doesn’t mean they had a damn thing to do with applied socialism.

2.  If there are legitimate problems with HR 3200, why are they not plastered all over the airwaves?  If Fox News could destroy the whole debate with some actual facts, they’d be all over that shit, instead of giving us nothing but contrived, fear-mongering bullshit like Death Boards, succor to illegals, and rationing.  More succinctly, if there’s a real reason HR 3200 shouldn’t pass, why make up insane lies (some of them baldly racist) to scare people about it?  The cause against reform has nothing in its hand but fear and ignorance.

Again, I have yet to hear a better solution.  There’s no point in arguing that the current system isn’t a bloated sham doing nothing but supporting PharmaCorp and insurance greed.  This is a fact.  The only sane option is reform.  If not HR 3200, then what?