[lbo-talk] Why discussing health care is so difficult

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Fri Aug 21 07:09:02 PDT 2009


Yup. From their conception, social security and its extension medicare have been deliberately advertised as "insurance schemes" different from "government assistance" to stave off attacks on them from the right. So public confusion on the issue is understandable.

What I find puzzling, however, is almost complete dearth in this fucked up country of any meaningful public campaign to project a good image of government services. The only timid attempts in that direction are signs "your taxes at work" in some road construction sites, which probably were put up only because private construction companies benefit form road construction largesse. By contrast, EU many media campaigns aiming at explaining the functioning of public institutions and policies.

The brainwashing of the Amrikan people so so complete that even well meaning liberals and bleeding hearts say without thinking twice that government is less efficient than private business (I overheard it myself a few days ago on the Metro.) This is not ordinary ignorance i.e. not knowing relevant facts, but active resistance to learning any facts that may contradict the pro-capitalist bullshit with which every Amrikan child is inculcated from the day it is born.

Wojtek

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 8:42 AM, Matthias Wasser <matthias.wasser at gmail.com>wrote:


> Might we be misreading this?
>
> Someone who knows what Medicare is and was asked whether the government
> should "stay out" of it would probably interpret it as asking whether
> Medicare should continue to have the same setup as it has currently. This
> is
> is likely an unfeasible opinion, depending on how broadly it is stated, but
> it's not as crazy as thinking Medicare is like some private thing.
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>



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