Hopefully I’ll follow my own advice and this will be the last thing I write about this. Saturday (yesterday) there was a rally at the Lincoln Memorial for something. According to the few news reports I saw, there was a good sized crowd, although I didn’t hear any numbers. At least two people who are recognized on a national level spoke and everything was calm and peaceful. I did hear a few seconds of sound bites and what the topic appeared to be was taking back something they felt had been lost. What they felt had been lost was not clear.
I’m glad they were able to hold such a peaceful rally. I do not think there was the miracle that the promoter of the rally prophesied. But I also think that even though it was declared to be a non-political event, there was politics there. The theme of taking back and restoring is a political issue. You only want to do those things when you feel they have been lost. I think that there are some things that we as Americans are missing that we had in the past, but I also believe that we have gained a lot of insight, compassion and understanding that we lacked in the past. What makes this political is that you cannot speak in generalities, nor can you invite speakers from a single perspective and expect it not to be political. If this had truly been non-political, then there would have been a wide variety of people would have spoken. You also cannot speak in generalities about lack, lost and winning back without getting into specifics and when you do get to specifics, you get political.
More On HealthCare
I find it incredibly interesting that there is still so much grumbling about health care reform even as the changes are just being phased in. Most of the grumbling comes from people who think they are going to have to pay more for health care than they currently are now. Well, the first thing I say to that is that your costs for health care had at least tripled in the last 10 years without reform. If all the reform does is slow that increase down, you’re going to be ahead on that. Another thing I have to ask; does this mean your against affordable health care for everyone? How do you feel about affordable health care for children with pre-existing conditions? How about the same for adults with pre-existing conditions? The Health Care Insurance industry is spreading word that they expect that their rates will triple because of the reforms that have been passed. WTF? Are they going to triple because you will have to provide coverage to people you refused to cover in the past? You mean your profits might suffer because you have to provide what you should have been providing all along? You’ll have to prove that, since your forecasts have not been so reliable in the past, and you have a really strong reason to see these reforms reversed from greedy point of view. Health Care like education is a common need and should not be just another commodity. Health Care should be something that everyone has access to. Your old system prevented large numbers of people from having access. Be part of the solution or get out of town!
The other side of things is I hear people on the left complaining that the reforms didn’t go far enough and that Congress and the President failed us. I tend to see that the was a very powerful lobby (read Health Care Insurers) and their minions in the Congress (read republicans (small r because of the small mindedness)) that threw up every roadblock they could in the way. What the Democrats and the President did was to get things rolling. Something, that if you know your recent history, has not been done before. We have a beginning and something in this case was better than nothing. We have some things we needed, while there are other things that still need to be done. You can’t get everything you want or you turn out to be BP CEO who wants his life back after screwing up Mother Nature and the Gulf Coast. Take what you have, and build on that. Progress is not instantaneous and sometimes moves very slowly. It took millennia for us to progress from using dray animals for transportation to the age of the automobile. Healthcare reform hopefully won’t take that long.
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