This may not seem like a fair headline, but after watching the two Republican debates it has cemented my opinion that the average member of the Tea Party must be suffering from some paranoid delusion. They seem incapable of hearing their own hypocrisy let alone able to do anything about it. There is so much stupidity in this that one blog will not even suffice, so I will rename this blog to:
Tea Party Members are Stupid about Healthcare:
Now, that sounds a little better, but still too broad. I mean, they keep blaming "Obamacare" for the "uncertainty of job creators" and yet they forget that Bush only managed to grow jobs by 2% during his entire eight years. (They also blame regulation and high taxes and yet corporate America is very profitable, earning record profits so maybe, just maybe their lack of hiring, growth and expansion has little to do with regulation and more to do with _____?"
What has truly prompted me to blog about the Tea Party and their idiocy when it comes to healthcare was the latest CNN/Tea Party presidential debate. When Wolf Blitzer asked Ron Paul if the government (the richest government in the world) should just let an uninsured man die, and the audience shouted out "Yeah" and then applauded I almost choked on my beer. Seriously? This is how we conduct ourselves on national T.V. during a presidential debate? I shouldn't have been surprised when at the last debate the audience cheered the number of executions in the state of Texas (Where, of course, they always put "Life First") but it was never-the-less shocking. Especially when the audience members themselves are considered.
By and large, the people who spoke from the Tea Party asking questions during the debate were over 50 and overweight. They must all be knocking on the door of diabetes (a pre-existing condition) and if they had medical insurance it must have either been issued from an employer or by the government.
In order for the question to really hit home for these idiots, Wolf should have asked "What do we do with a 50 year old, recently unemployed and therefore uninsured man who can't qualify for insurance because he is slightly overweight and is pre-diabetic?". Or even take that same man who is still employed but has reached his lifetime maximum on his health insurance because he has had one minor heart attack. Would they still shout to "let him die?" Would they even have the presence of mind to understand that the man they have voted to death would be the one standing next to them? Could they ever recognize themselves in that question despite their narcissism?
If a Tea Party member did manage to look around when asked that question and understand that the person they have "voted off the island" was one of their own would they then ask if pre-existing conditions should be part of healthcare. Would they see a need for government to regulate the very profitable health insurance industry so that they ceased having monetary limits imposed on people's lives. Would they think that maybe, just maybe, health insurance shouldn't be inexorably linked to employment, and that health coverage shouldn't be at the whim of the employer because there would be no way an individual who was pre-diabetic could ever qualify or afford an individual policy.
Thank goodness somebody did ask and answer these questions. President Obama worked to reform our healthcare so that these things would stop happening. The trade off that we will all have to pay in order to ensure that healthcare will be there when needed is that we all have health insurance. We trade our personal liberty for lessor things all the time. Even though the chances that you or I would be personally involved in a terrorist attack is slim, we allowed the government access to our emails, bank accounts and many other things when the Patriot Act was passed and extended. As the national obesity rates continues to climb (especially in uninsured Tea Party, Red States)the odds seem much higher that people will need to trade a small liberty for insulin rather then a larger one for protection from terrorism.
We should all be supporting Obamacare because at least he cared. I wish, for his sake, he would have cared more about himself then the insurance industries he was trying to work with when he settled for 2014 as a total enactment date. At least the parents of recent college graduates can find some peace in knowing that their children will be able to stay on heir parent's policy for a bit longer while those graduates struggle to find employment in this dismal market. At least the children who couldn't get insurance because of a pre-existing condition are now covered. THOSE are the parents who should be rallying around the President shouting at the top of their lungs "Let him Live, he CARES!"
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