The Health Care Debate

From Rachel Maddow:

What’s being called a debate about health care policy right now is so far from an actual debate about health care policy that the charge from his critics that the President of the United States has to rebut in public is whether or not he wants health care reform because he secretly wants to kill all of the old people. And apparently he doesn’t.

The debate has been masterfully (and nefariously) turned into slogans and symbols and diversions by the Right, the Republicans, Big Medicine/Insurance/Pharma, in order to make it not be a debate over people unable to get adequate (or any) health coverage, hence not getting adequate (or any) health care. That prospect so scary that people tend to only want to think about it when it’s happening to them, and that reluctance has been seized upon and exploited by waving big colorful targets for folks to latch on: labels of “socialism” and ridiculous charges about “death panels” and the like.

It’s all smoke, mirrors, and side shows, in order to retain (or retake) power and/or profits. It is, in its own way, an ultimate test of our representative democracy: not, as some on the Right would frame it, whether we vote ourselves bread and circuses, regardless of the cost, but whether an opposition can subvert democracy by sending the populace (or a substantial, vocal part of it) hallooing off after will-o-the-wisps of artificial and rhetorical terror.

If we do not get substantive health care coverage reform out of this Congress, it will mark the ultimate triumph of the old catch phrase, “If you can’t dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your bullshit.” It will be a sign that we can be diverted from what the majority (of both populace and representatives) clearly want by making the debate about stuff and nonsense. It will be, arguably, the greatest failure of our system of government.

So let me close with another quote, this one from James Madison:

A popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps, both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. And a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.

If the the opposition can control the information the people have, keeping them in ignorance with distracting lies about euthanizing grandma, they control the people. It’s really that simple.