January 3, 2010

Everything is perception. For the uninformed, watching and believing cable news channels like Fox help them make decisions based on misinformation. Their reaction to the "news" becomes visceral, personal and very real. Health care for all becomes an enemy to be attacked at all costs. The more these fears are internalized the more real it becomes.

Though health care costs are about 15 percent of the gross national product and may cause as many as 40,000 unneeded deaths these are just numbers to the fearful. They believe current health care system is democratic and American and changing it is bad. To them, universal health care is socialist or communist.

Here is a recent reader comment responding to an article about a free health care clinic in Tennessee:

“Free healthcare = COMMUNISM! We need to shut these free clinics down. By giving away care and medicine they are damaging local, private clinics and doctors practices and drug stores. They are also being used as a Marxist propaganda vehicle by Obama and his cohorts. I notice Fox News does not bother covering them anymore.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34633188/ns/health-health_care/

When people believe this and then even write in this way the divisions become very clear and startling.

Free clinics do good for the working and uninsured poor but they are not a solution for our health care system but to say they shouldn't be held at all is incredible. Where is the spirit of human kindness and giving? For many, it has been suppressed and obliterated by political paranoia and meanness. The Health Insurance Company Terrorists have surely won.

If Muslim terrorists killed forty thousand people a year in the United States, you bet we would take care of the problem.