CURRENT MOON

Wednesday, October 17, 2007

They Don't Even Try To Be Logically Consistent


It's old news by now that the Republicans and their orc pit of bloggers have taken to attacking the families of kids who benefitted from SCHIP, the children's health insurance program that Congress wants to expand and that Bush has vetoed.

What's interesting about the latest attack is that it's directed against a family that lacked insurance but chose to have a child, anyway. The child had a serious heart condition that required expensive health care. (The mother had insurance years ago at a prior job, but quit when that job became "unmanageable" and has worked for years as a waitress at a restaurant that doesn't provide insurance.) The right wing slime machine is in high dudgeon over the notion that this family shouldn't have had kids if they didn't want to work at jobs that provide insurance.

Of course, the right wing also doesn't believe in family planning or birth control. What was this married couple supposed to do -- abstain from sex forever? What if they'd saved enough to pay for a normal hospital birth for a healthy child, but discovered, while the mother was still pregnant, that the child, when born, would have an expensive heart condition? An abortion at that point would be affordable, out of their savings, but they couldn't afford the health care. In the wingnut world, what should they have done? Remember, wingnuts hate abortion worst of all.

And, of course, there's no end to the "objections" the wingnuts can come up with when they presume to decide how other people should live their lives. What about people who have jobs that provide insurance, have a child, lose that job to "oursourcing" (it happens in George Bush's America) and then their child develops an expensive medical condition? Sure, we could go back and criticize some "choice" they made -- there was that year that they took the family to Disney Land instead of foreseeing that their child would develop cancer and need to be hospitalized for a month. If they'd invested that money in the stock market -- oh, wait.

In the end, it's all just nuts. We're the richest country on Earth. We can afford trillions of dollars for an war of aggression against a country that didn't attack us. Our wealthiest citizens pay ridiculously little in taxes. If we have money for that, we have money to provide health care for working families, people like waitresses and cabinetmakers. The notion that people should have to "choose" between working at the vanishingly few jobs that provide real health insurance and having a child or between owning a home and having a child or between being self-employed or having a child is just goofy. Well, no, it's more than just goofy. It's evil and pernicious and disgusting. I'm looking at you, Republican Party.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you for a better job that I made of this story. I was reduced to a kind of brain shocked wonder that they would so deride the "choices" this family made, but not have anything but pity and compassion for the choices made by....oh, I don't know Ken Lay and Scooter Libby, for instance?

Dirk Gently said...

What was this married couple supposed to do -- abstain from sex forever?

yes. women are only allowed to have sex for procreation, which is why god made them not enjoy it and gave them the additional fun of russian roulette pregnancy.

men can have sex any time they want as long as they are white, christian and privileged (preferably members of congress), but only with their wives (unless they are members of congress).

hope that clears things up for you.

Ruth said...

Jeez, don't you know when some one gets unlucky, that shows god doesn't like them? Why do you think poor kids get less for xmas, anyway. Get with the pogrom.

Anne Johnson said...

And these people think they're going to heaven? NOT! FUCKIN NOT! NOT! NOT! NOT!

Anonymous said...

Word.

Republicans are assholes. There, I said it. And I'm not taking it back. Evil and pernicious only starts to cover it. I'd really, really like it if someone did a study to find out how many people in "red" states take advantage of programs like SCHIP; I'd be willing to bet cash money (if I had any) that the per capita ratio is higher than in "blue" states.

Anonymous said...

I'm having an interesting adventure in the world of current insurance/health care. I've managed to obtain actual health insurance, at a reasonable rate - but now discover that the physicians whom I would like to have do not 'accept' this particular variety. I haven't asked what makes this variety untenable - I don't really care. But it is becoming apparent that the chokepoint is not at the level of yes/no insurance or not - but at the physician level.

And that, mes amis, is why single payer insurance is the only possible answer. Physicians provide a service. They are not a small business which can choose to deny service to those without the shoes or shirts they like. Refusal to accept perfectly acceptable insurance tells me that their choices are based on something other than mere expedience.
/GWPDA

The Kenosha Kid said...

It's high "dudgeon" not "dungeon."

/pedant

Aquila ka Hecate said...

Oh I don't know- high dungeon seems to fit the bill perfectly. :)

From an outsider's point of view, this looks a lot like religion-pressure to behave like (and work in the approved fields of) the moral tyrants.
"If you don't get a job with health insurance you're not part of the system and can fuck off and die" is what I'm hearing.

Love,
Terri with health insurance in Joburg

Hecate said...

Kenosha Kid,

Thank you -- I have been misuing that my entire life and never knew! Fixed now.

Anonymous said...

WRT blue states/red states, I do know that largely blue states are the ones that pay out more federal taxes than they get back in federal services and red states are the ones that receive more than they give. Which just proves that not only are Republicans complete tools, they're also bad at math.