Exploring Our Matrix

It’s worse than that.  The health care reform is actually projected to save money.

http://www.cbo.gov/publications/collections/health.cfm

Now, true universal health care like the rest of the developed world has would cost a bit more, but that went off the table a long time ago.

George Will had an editorial from a conservative perspective that was a good read. I’ll try to find it….

Outrageous! The Skewed Values of Many American Christians http://t.co/NMs80I7f

I am opposed to unnecessary wars and government run health care; but not for reasons having anything to do with money.  In the first case I object to the needless loss of life, in the second what I think-I know many disagree-will be a great reduction in the quality of care given to many people.  

Our humanitarian aid doesn’t even get to the people that need it many times, because of corrupt or authoritarian governments…Why do we continue to think that just because people have a need, they are entitled to help, when their own government won’t meet those needs? Why do we think that these governments will allow the U.S. to do good and get credit for it? Won’t they use it as another attempt toward propaganda? and to maintain their power and control? In the meantime, the American people suffer but no one seems to care to address the issues….

War is the right to protect sovereign interests, but this is the problem in the eyes of those that think that we don’t have any right to our OWN power or sovereignty! We need to “level the playing field”, and become a 3rd world nation, so that things will be equal! OR we attempt to build democracies, where people have no capacity to understand or appreciate democracy!

I have a friend who lives in Namibia. She told me many years ago that trying to make Americans out of these tribal mentalities is useless. She has lived there since the early 80′s. I would think that she would know. She expects when she leaves her house for any length of time, that it will be broken into, because there is no respect for the rule of law…private property is only respected by those that have Western backgrounds…So is one’s culture bias an essential or non essential aspect to identity?

I’ll put my tongue in cheek, two cents worth into this political argument.  I’ve lived an extraordinarily healthy life.  I don’t have health insurance because I choose not to have it.  I don’t want to be forced to join a pool of people who have lived unhealthy lives and have jacked up the costs of medical care because they don’t know how to practice preventive medicine.  I’ll pay in cash if an emergency ever arises.  If I had a family then it would be different.  As for defending this country being labeled capitalism in the cartoon, it isn’t free market capitalism.  And to consider healing as communism, only an liberal would think this way, not a conservative Christian.  I’d like to show this cartoonist some pictures from the Killing Fields, where millions were healed in the name of communism. 

It’s $20,000 a pop for a 9 course treatment of chemotherapy. That’s just for the chemicals.  If you have that kind of cash laying around you don’t need health insurance. Most of us would come up a little short. By law, hospitals are required to provide emergency care to anyone who requires it, whether they can pay or not. This is an unfunded mandate, paid for by taxes and increased premiums for those of us who have health care insurance. To say a healthy lifestyle will prevent you from cancer, heart disease or being hit by a bus is absurd. I’d prefer to see everyone in the same insurance pool. Something like universal Medicare. But this law is not a bad start.

I like the cartoon. Should include a moon base, with a few hundred astronauts staring at their belly-botton (moon rocks are pretty much the same as earth rocks….originated from the same collision). And a stepping stone to other planets via astronauts is a bad argument…same rationale. Experiments can be done remotely. The irritating thing about moon exploration that we already performed, was done mostly by ex-military jet pilots, not scientists, anyway. Pretty much the same contractors that do the war thing, also do the space thing. Any space exploration, at least in the immediate future, can be done safer and more economical via robotics….see Martian rovers. If you find that the moon was made of gold, it still doesn’t make sense….the cost of transporting it to earth is more than the gold is worth. Military/space cross over is OK, but you run into the same problem….the emphasis is learning to kill more efficiently, instead of providing basic food, health care, and housing to the unwashed poor.

American Christianity, like every other religion, reflects the values, interests, and prejudices of the communities in which it is practiced and therefore has to protect itself from the intentions of its erstwhile founder since nothing is further from the Sermon on the Mount than the typical opinions of conservative Protestants. Nietzsche was being over dramatic when he asserted that there was only one Christian and he died on the cross; but the prosaic sociological version of the same idea is a mere fact. As a complete infidel, I can empathize. I’m politically liberal, but the Jesus of the Gospels is far to the left of me. On the other hand, the superbly hypocritical anti-Christianity of the Christians has a downside when it gives stupidity a good conscience as it does when it comes to health care. After all, the current system is not merely immoral, it’s bad engineering.

Denying the reality of biological evolution is child’s play compared to ignoring the plain awfulness of our health care system. We spend vastly more per person on health care than any other nation on earth, and yet get mediocre outcomes in terms of morbidity and mortality. The issue is not socialized medicine versus private medicine: the other nations vary greatly in how they set up their systems. What they all have in common is that they all guarantee care, and they all vastly out perform us. Universal health care isn’t some newfangled gimmick: it’s about as innovative as indoor plumbing.

re:
American Christianity, like every other religion, reflects the values, interests, and prejudices of the communities in which it is practiced  

unfortunately i think you are right, there is often a basic conflict between the community ideals and those of Jesus, the community’s always seem to prevail.

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