A Depressing Post

This morning, during the hour break between my classes, I decided to go through a drive-through and get some breakfast. I always listen to CDs in my car and never the radio. I had taken my CDs out of the car, for some reason, and so I started listening to what was on.

The show I chose seemed ok (I think it was Today’s Issues on American Family Radio). It was a political talk-show of some sort. They were discussing Hilary Clinton’s comments this morning concerning health care. She hadn’t said much. She’d just pointed out that at least 47 million people in the United States had no health insurance and that she’d support universal health care in her candidacy. No big surprise there. The first few moments of the radio show were just outlining her (rather brief) statements. This was all fine. It seemed interesting.

Then, they started talking of course. I will try to be as accurate on these quotations as I can be, but I’m going from memory here. I’m going to verify everything when the podcast goes up in a couple of days. I assure you that this is accurate concerning the nature of the broadcast.

Guy No. 1: “I will agree with Hillary on one thing; things are different now than when she proposed universal health care in 1993. I’m afraid she’s right that people would be more open to the idea of universal health care than they were then. For one thing, there’s an aging population, and there’s the AARP and those sorts really supporting it, and so there’s those people really eating this up.”

Guy No. 2: “Yeah, and all the Hispanics. They’re dying for universal healthcare. They’ll all think that’s appealing and vote for that. Especially all those illegal aliens. I tell you, you give them amnesty and let them vote, and the Republican Party will just be history. It won’t even exist anymore. It’ll just be the Democrats and whatever liberal party pops up on the left of them. Those immigrants would just love universal health care I’m sure.”

No. 1: “Yeah, you can see that she’s right that this would appeal to more people today. With healthcare costs as high as they are now, there are these portions of the society that could be convinced to think universal healthcare would be a good idea.”

No. 2: “But what these that this would appeal to don’t understand is how this would hurt the quality of the healthcare in the country. There would be longer waiting lines, and the doctors wouldn’t be as good. There wouldn’t be sufficient competition, so the medical field would stop improving. Sure, offer these people a little healthcare, and they’re going to be tempted to take it without seeing that it’s socialism.”

No. 1: “What’s going to matter is how these people see it. If we can make them see it as socialism, it can be stopped. But if they see it as universal health care, it won’t be.”

No. 2: “Unfortunately, these people are getting their truth, their version of truth, from CNN and ABC and CBS and the AARP and all the people brainwashing them to think that way. It’s could really happen. We could end up with socialized medicine. It’s scary to think about really. Let’s go to commercial.”

Of course, it was a commercial for the station, trumpeting their Christian values.

Things are scary indeed.

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Update on my grandmother. She was kicked out of the hospital even though everyone, including the doctor, knows she’s strong enough to be out of it yet and even though she’s still needs the equipment hooked up to monitor her heart rate and blood sugar. Medicare won’t pay for her to stay longer, however, and the family can’t come close to affording the health costs either. She’s in a nursing facility now where she’s expected to feed herself, although it might be a few weeks before she can do that for herself. Of course, the family’s trying to be there as much as possible to help with that sort of thing (though since everyone works and lives all over the state, this is going to be difficult). Grandma does still need to have people stay up with her at night to help monitor everything and to just be with her (since she’s far from out of the woods), at least for these first couple of nights. So far, there’s been somebody to do that every night for the last couple of weeks. At the nursing facility, however, this won’t be allowed.

These are just a couple of the problems. Things are not going too well.