Ten crazy things right-wingers believe

One thing that has become clear, looking at the right-wing responses to the health care proposals in Congress, is that they are, to put it bluntly, batshit crazy. Here's ten of the crazy things they believe, in no particular order, and limited to ten only because they have an infinite number of crazy things they believe.

1.Only Americans have liberty. Because universal health care "takes our liberty", and all other Western democracies have universal healthcare, only Americans are truly free. And unicorns are real, and cotton candy grows on trees. This would certainly be news to the average arrogant snooty liberty-obsessive Frenchman, who would point out that he has every liberty Americans have except the liberty to die like a dog in the streets for lack of health insurance, be bankrupted by bills his insurer won't pay if he develops a serious illness, or be driven into permanent poverty after a serious illness because nobody will hire you after a severe illness because of the $1M surcharge their insurer would immediately slap onto your company's group health insurance policy. At this point the lunatic handwaves and says "He's not free, he just doesn't know it."

2. At which point the crazy right-winger says, Nobody ever dies for lack of health insurance in America. Which of course is ridiculous. Excess mortality studies show that uninsured and underinsured Americans are more likely to die of a wide variety of illnesses than insured Americans. At this point the lunatic puts his hands over his head and says "I see nothing, I hear nothing, Eric De La Cruz never existed."

3. Every other healthcare system has waiting lists and rationing. Of course, there is neither waiting lists nor rationing in the French healthcare system, but he'll handwave that, "there's some specialty X where it might take two weeks to get an appointment in France, so THERE!".

4. Only Americans have access to advanced treatments. Of course, that is not true (click the France article above), but that is not a problem, he has faith, FAITH I say, in his Party commissars at Cato Institute and talk radio and Fox News, and surely they wouldn't lie to him!

5. Taxes are slavery. I already dealt with that one.

6. Government can't do anything right. Said on a government-created Internet as he sits in his home protected by a government fire station as a government police officer goes by, as criminals who would break into his home and kill him languish instead in a government prison, after going to his job on a government road and being paid his contractual wages because he has the ability to go to a government court to force back wages to be paid to him.

7. Medicare is a horrific nightmare of rationing, waiting lists, and the government telling you what doctor you can see and when. It's astounding how the right wing can outright lie with a straight face. Medicare patients have more freedom to choose their own doctor, are more satisfied with the care they receive, and nobody ever tells a Medicare recipient's doctor what care to provide. The same is not, of course, true with private insurers, who regularly fight with doctors to avoid paying for procedures that people need.

8. A government healthcare system would be horribly expensive! The only problem: Every single statistic says that's not true. The more government involvement in healthcare, the cheaper healthcare seems to become. Indeed, when Taiwan went single-payer in 1996, the savings were so enormous that the year afterward, they covered 40% uninsured WITH NO INCREASE IN OVERALL COSTS because of getting rid of the horrific administrative inefficiencies imposed by having 1500 different payers each of which have their own rules and their own procedures, which requires as much as 60% administrative overhead from some providers to negotiate the system. There is a point at which you don't want more government involvement because it reduces your choice and affects the quality of care -- Britain has arrived at that point (in Britain's socialized medicine system, all doctors are government employees, all hospitals are owned by the government, and private insurance is illegal) -- but nobody proposes that system for America.

9. Canada and Britain. You notice that in the right-wing healthcare universe, there are only two other countries? Countries like France, Switzerland, Japan, etc. that get excellent results with their universal healthcare systems always seem to get omitted from any discussion by the right wing, perhaps because Switzerland shows that you can have drug innovation in a universal system (the Swiss drug companies are second only to the US in innovation, even though Switzerland is a much smaller nation), while France and Japan show that you can get excellent cancer treatment in universal systems.

10. America has the best health care system in the world. Arguably true, *if* you are one of the 70% of Americans with private insurance or Medicare. If you are one of the 30% who are uninsured or on Medicaid, that is quite untrue -- you do not get the best healthcare in the world, you get 3rd world care. That shows in the statistics, where, other than breast and prostate cancer statistics (where the American Cancer Society has done a stalwart job of making sure that breast and prostate cancer screening are available for all Americans), the U.S. compares horribly with most Western nations -- higher infant mortality, lower lifespan, fewer doctors, and fewer hospital beds today than we had in 1973 when our population was much smaller. In short, what this shows is that the core health care *provider* system works quite well for the 70% of Americans who have full access to it -- but we have a funding problem, where it bankrupts people far too often and cuts 30% of Americans entirely out of the real system and relegates them to a 3rd world ghetto healthcare system.

We're spending the most, but getting mediocre results. We can do better. But the lunatics in the right wing, with their preference for believing their Party commissars at Cato, Heritage, hate radio, and Faux News to believing, well, in REALITY, just put their hands over their ears and yell "LALALA I can't hear you! Tyranny! Waiting lists! Best in world! Lalalala!". It's sad, really, how grown men and women can be so childish as to want to live in a fantasy world of unicorns and cotton candy trees rather than the real world that the rest of us live in, the world where facts are facts, France has one of the best health care systems on the world, and the U.S. system for funding healthcare is fundamentally broken. So it goes -- there will always be those more interested in believing their delusions, than in what is real and true.

-- Badtux the "Too many lunatics!" Penguin