The Brainwashing of America, a case study:

[marmar]

Two friends and I were having a discussion about universal health care yesterday at a coffee house in Ann Arbor. We were discussing which country's system we should emulate, personal health care stories Blah Blah Blah.
Then this guy from Ohio, who was visiting to help his U of Michigan student son move into an apartment, injects himself into the conversation, talks about what a disaster "socialism medicine" is, and how much better the US health care system is than anyone else's.
My friends kind of rolled their eyes with "Oh Lord, One of Those!" looks on their faces and didn't say anything. I felt the need to engage this guy, and mentioned how poorly the United States fared compared to the rest of the First World, and even some of the non-First World, when it came to health stats.
He then said those are all lies put out by liberal and socialist groups, and that U.S. health care is the best. I then offered to walk over to the UM computer lab with him and show him all the mainstream organizations that verify my facts. He got a little more agitated and said "It doesn't matter. Our health care is the best."
I told him that nearly half the country was either uninsured or under-insured, and not everyone had good insurance like he presumably does. THEN he told me he was self-employed and didn't have insurance, but it didn't matter 'CAUSE HE NEVER GETS SICK!!! "I'm not going to live off government socialism," he retorted.
At that point I wished him and his son well and gave up. Some skulls can't be penetrated.

[progressiveforever]

1. "Some skulls can't be penetrated"

Your last line says so much. I am from Ohio as well and I know the type you are referring too. It's a mindset that is more like a program. It will only do what it will and nothing more. I think this is probably the 32% that always support Bush.

[Demeter]

2. We Are Neighbors, Then!

I'm in Ann Arbor, too!

And you have to have a really hard head to survive in Ohio, I think. Otherwise, the reality would kill you.

Having experienced socialized medicine firsthand in Finland, I have to say we are barbarians.

[LWolf]

3. We allow, and participate in,

that brain washing every time we lend legitimacy to the msm by watching, listening, and repeating.

I "never get sick," either.

Except when I do.

That man WILL discover the need for universal health insurance the hard way.

[tjwash]

4. Meanwhile, right up the street from my house...

Grossmont Hospital Cited For 'Preventable Deaths'.

Just the tip of the iceberg according to a friend of mine who works there.

The nurses there are so fucking overworked it's not even funny. multiple-split and 16 hour shifts are not uncommon, and my friend routinely puts in 70-80 hour weeks. All this and they keep trying to bust up the nurses union.

[geckosfeet]

5. So, he can somehow reconcile the fact that he has no health insurance

with having the best health care "in the world".

Minds like this are in deep deep denial. The "I never get sick" part is just precious.

[RufusTFirefly]

6. You can't reason someone out of something...

... that they weren't reasoned into in the first place.

I had an argument about global warming with someone who should've been smart enough to know better.

After our argument, I spent a lot of time pulling together material from some unimpeachable sources: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, The Royal Society, etc., and sent it to him. Without even reading the material or examining the data, he dismissed it as "biased."

[Obamarama]

7. Well, at least there's something of a potential silver-lining to this anecdote:

His son is spending, presumably, four to five years going to UM An Arbor, which is as liberal an environment one is likely to find in the Midwest, with the exception of Madison, WI. Maybe his son will manage to become "deprogrammed" in that time? We can only hope!

[marmar]

10. True.....And his son didn't say anything, which kinda led me to believe....

.... he wasn't really too keen on dear old dad's thinking. Ann Arbor is probably a big culture shock for a right-winger.

[Turbineguy]

8. The success of the brainwashing lies

in the fact that he is partially correct. The US does have the best health care if you chose to look at it in a very narrow view. If you are rich, privileged or don't get sick it works fine. As for the rest of us....

As for living off government socialism... if he is self-employed and incorporated he should be getting some nice tax breaks.

[Warpy]

9. Admitting the truth makes them feel unsafe

so they get defensive when somebody tries to rub their noses in it.

They know the truth. They just think if they ignore it, it won't happen to them.

Sadly, it does.

[fasttense]

11. But America already has "socialism medicine".

The VA is exactly that - a socialized form of health care. My health care is great. But my friend, a former owner of a small business, had to sell the business and his house to pay his medical bills. He had no health insurance because he had a pre-existing heart problem. Instead of paying for huge health insurance premiums, he had one of those medical savings accounts. He had about $10,000 in it when he had a heart attack. But the bills were 30 times what he had saved. Now he is an employee of the business making half of what he use to and living out of his sister's basement.

It breaks my heart to know his life has been destroyed because he got sick.

[Marblehead]

12. another dumbass n/t

[sharesunited]

13. You can ease them into it by simply calling it Medicare for All. More familiar, less confusing.

And less likely to trigger purely ideological reactions.

Anyone who has grandparents or aging parents is automatically at a first-hand disadvantage to oppose you.

[Peace Patriot]

14. "...and even some of the non-First World." Cuba, for instance, which has one of the best

health care systems in the world, with the lowest infant mortality rate (a key indicator) in the western hemisphere. There is NO REASON--if reason were to be applied--that we couldn't adopt many or all features of Cuba's health care system, without becoming "godless communists." That is, if our country were run by mature adults. But reason ain't in it. On Cuba policy (and, indeed, all Latin American policy) our leaders are either petulant children or insane. It is so ironic that people whom the rightwing call "godless" take the Christian view of health care: that it is NOT a money-making opportunity; it is and act of mercy. They, first of all, provide FREE medical educations to all qualified students. That alone would transform our medical system, since one of the drivers of medical costs is the horrendous debt that most young doctors find themselves in at the beginning of their careers. Another driver is the limited number of qualified people permitted into medical schools--a deliberate cap on those highly prized, vital skills.

Cuba now EXPORTS doctors, for instance, to Venezuela, in exchange for cheap oil. This allows Venezuela--whose rightwing oil elite utterly neglected their country's health care and educational systems--to jumpstart medical care for the poor with new medical clinics in all the poverty-stricken areas never before served by government, while Venezuelan (and other foreign) students get their FREE medical educations in CUBA. Cuban doctors are also helping the poor in Bolivia, Ecuador and other countries. And Cuba provides FREE eye operations for the blind, and works with other countries to fly the poor blind to Cuba for eyesight restoration. Cuba exports mercy. The U.S. exports armaments and other military booty, big agriculture's produce dumped at cheap prices on third world markets to destroy their local food producers, and bad 'christian' nutball ideas (for instance, closing third world women's health clinics if they even mention abortion as an option to dirt poor pregnant women on their seventh pregnancy or the rape victims in a war zone).

We may not approve of Cuba's political system. And Cuba may not approve of ours. We, after all, hold elections that are far less transparent than any election system since Stalinist Russia.* That is no reason to deny, and refuse to learn from, something that Cuba does well--universal health care.

---------------------

*It was Josef Stalin who is believed to have said, ""Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." In the U.S.A., three rightwing Bushite corporations now 'count' all our votes, using 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code in all the shiny new electronic voting systems, with virtually no audit/recount controls. Many states in the U.S. (40% to 50%) have absolutely no way to verify the vote. They don't provide a paper ballot backup--there is nothing to recount or audit. And even the best states do only a 1% audit of the electronic totals--miserably inadequate in a 'TRADE SECRET' code system.

By contrast, Venezuela has electronic voting, but it is an OPEN SOURCE code system--no 'trade secrets'; anyone may review the code by which the votes are tabulated--and they handcount a whopping 55% of the votes, as a check on machine fraud. Is it any wonder, then, that Venezuelans are able to elect a government with a sane, mature, mutually beneficial attitude towards Cuba, among other beneficial policies, while we got "four more years" of the insane, immature, destructive, criminal, fascist horrors of Bush-Cheney. They stole 2000 by buying the Supreme Court; by 2004, however, 80% of the country's votes were 'counted' by their buds at Diebold, ES&S and Sequoia, who also (s)elected this Democratic Congress in '06, which now has a single digit approval rating. (The fascist coup in our voting system occurred between 2002 and 2004, with the fast-tracking of these election theft machines all over the country.) Is Cuba's system any worse than this? It is flawed, certainly. But, frankly, ours is fatally flawed--as the dead of Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans could tell us, if the dead could speak.

[oldskool]

15. It is called NLP

Neuro Linguistic PROGRAMming.

[ColbertWatcher]

16. Technically ...

...that's not a "case study" but an anecdote.

Regardless, the man clearly suffers from republicanism.

Let's hope that he can get the treatment he needs before it becomes fatal and that one day science can find a cure for it.

[warren pease]

17. Was he in a wheel chair?

You'd expect an idiot who's constantly shooting himself in the foot would have a tough time getting around, particularly since he's neither rich nor insured so he must be treating himself since he refuses to "live off government socialism."

Fact is, though, the US is the only so-called advanced country in the world where lack of medical insurance is a capital crime. Real advanced countries, of course, don't toss their citizens on the scrap heap once they're no longer producing or consuming. But we're pretty damn good at it, christian nation that we are.

About 22K people die in the US each year because they don't have access to proper health care, so a disease or infection that could have been treated and cured at an early stage just rages out of control until they're dead.

The very people this indoctrinated jackass probably regards as lazy deadbeats and losers and symbols of the failure of liberalism who should have been euthanized before they could reproduce.

But I doubt he's willing to die for his devotion to predatory capitalism and hatred of "big gummint," so I'd expect him to turn into another whining hypocritical welfare queen the very second he realizes that lump just below his ear lobe is getting noticeably bigger more painful every week.

It's not so hard abandoning Any Rand for Michael Moore when it's your ass on the line. Just so his friends don't find out about it...


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[Disturbed]

18. Sadly, there are millions of Americans like this guy.

Millions refuse to study the facts about Health Care & stick to their ignorance with tenacity.

[warren pease]

19. Millions of Americans wouldn't know up from down unless they dropped an anvil ...

...to see whether it breaks their toes or their skulls.

(Caution: Another rambling essay when I intended maybe 100 words. It's just hard to confine my hatred of for-profit medicine, and the idiots who support it, to a paragraph or two. Read at your own risk.)

When I first began to understand how this extortion racket works -- who gains and who loses -- I figured that any improvements, much less dumping the whole for profit scam and setting up a proper system like civilized countries have, would require that tens of millions of people each have their very own managed care moment.

Gawd knows there are enough outrages to go around. Claims routinely denied for no reason other than "corporate policy." People dropped from a plan, with no prior notification, just because they were costing the bastards too much in claims. Which is to say, the sons of bitches flat refused to do what's supposed to be their jobs -- paying the bills for the people who give them mountains of money every month with the expectation that insurers would uphold their end of the deal. But that's sooooo 19th century.

We no longer expect any individual or company to honor their commitments. In fact, we expect the exact opposite, which is why there are about 15 lawyers for every American these days. Well... maybe not, but breach of contract is the happening thing in courtrooms all across America.

Then there are the armies of insurance company snoops who spend their miserable worthless lives picking through every allegedly private medical record since the subscriber's birth looking for some pre-existing condition that would allow them to void the contract.

If they find anything at all, no matter how medically trivial, not only do they drop this former "member" like a lit cherry bomb, they often sue them for fraud for filling out an "incomplete" application. Didn't know that hangnail or sprained ankle back in 1972 could lead to financial ruin, did you?

But it gets even worse. If the swine win that case, as they do most of the time, they then have legal grounds to deny any and all pending claims.

Time to administer the coup de gras: they may even sue their now impoverished former client to recover every cent the parasites ever paid out the whole time the subscriber was covered by this particular insurance company. In my case, this would be many thousands that I couldn't possibly come up with.

So it's off to bankruptcy court, which isn't much of a deal since people like Obama's VP selection gave away the store to benefit the corporatocracy and, in the process, screwed the peasants yet again. Thanks to bankruptcy "reform," this poor criminal will never have another nickel that isn't already consigned to the insurer's pockets.

And still millions of people continue to take this shit without putting up a fight or even directing their rage where it belongs: executive row, the board room and, worse of all, the bought and paid for members of congress who keep this system alive when it should have died 50 years ago.

But the most amazing thing of all -- at least to me -- is how completely successful the right wing has been in turning a formerly savvy, take-no-shit population into a bunch of ignorant, apathetic, compliant slobs who actually take pride in their own stupidity.

If you're trying to get the public to buy into its own destruction, it's good to prepare them by implementing a covert devolution program specifically designed to reduce them to debt-ridden, chronically broke, scared, dumb, powerless proles. And that's exactly the kind of malleable idiots you want as your target market, the kind who wouldn't recognize class warfare if an arrow made of starched thousand dollar bills embedded itself in their shoulder.

Which is how you produce people like that hopeless fool introduced in the opening post. It's a tribute to how effective corporate propaganda has been, particularly when delivered by cheerful chowderheads in living color on TV, the great disinformation machine of all time.

It's one thing to get people to sit down, shut up and take what they're given. It's another to suck them into supporting status quo corporate malevolence that they enthusiastically applaud their own screwing.

It's like Winston Smith at his moment of ultimate self-betrayal when Orwell tells us that despite his quiet, determined struggle to assert his humanity, Winston has finally learned to love Big Brother.


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