Bad Deeds for 8-18-2009

 

To My Conservative Friends,

I cannot even begin to consider your view that America is a Christian nation until we have universal health care. Jesus said we should care for the sick. Period. Who would Jesus decline care to? Wouldn’t he endorse the public option? When he healed the sick, there wasn’t even a co-pay.
But maybe instead of healing the sick, your sensibilities are more in line with Joe the Plumber, who speaking about Nancy Pelosi said that “those kind of people I usually took behind the woodshed and beat the livin’ tar out of.”

 

And another thing,

It’s not okay to throw the word “Nazi” around unless you’re talking about actual Nazis. It’s definitely not okay to use it in a health care debate. In fact, put Nazi and doctor in the same sentence and you come up with one name and one name only — Josef Mengele. I’m going to assume you don’t know who Josef Mengele was. I assume that because if you did, I’d hope you wouldn’t be painting Swastikas on your picket signs.

• Dr. Mengele drew a horizontal line across a wall at Auschwitz, five feet from the floor. If you were shorter than that line you were immediately sent to the gas chamber. The line was drawn in the children’s’ barracks.
• Dr. Mengele performed experiments on live, fully conscious human beings to determine just how much pressure it would take to crush a skull. In order to be precise, he had to administer the experiment very slowly.
• Dr. Mengele put people in bread ovens to determine at exactly what temperature the skin would receive first, second and third degree burns.
• Dr. Mengele once murdered a thousand women in one day. Why? Because they had lice and it cost less to kill the women than to kill the lice.

Are you getting it now town hallers, town hollers and town criers? You may not like Barack Obama, but calling him a Nazi makes you sound like a clown, an imbecile and an infant. And continuing to cry about America no longer resembling the one you grew up in only further proves the point that you got it backwards. It’s America that did the growing up, and you’re the one we no longer recognize.

 

And yes, you’re scaring me,

But it’s not about death panels or socialism. America’s currently insured middle class will be increasingly desperate if health reform fails. Millions more such families will see their take-home pay shrink. Millions will lose their employment-based insurance, especially in medium and small-sized firms. And millions will find themselves inexorably priced out of health care as we know it.

If efforts at better cost containment fail once again, and health care costs rise to $36,000 on average for a typical American family of four under age 65 — as almost surely it would — that $36,000 will be borne entirely by the family. That family’s disposable income would be much higher if the growth of future health spending was better controlled. And, as noted, many smaller firms will stop altogether providing job-based health insurance.

It would be a major problem for families with an income of less than $100,000 a year. In 2007, only about 25 percent of American families had a money income of $100,000 or more. Close to 60 percent had family incomes of less than $75,000.

This prospect — relatively stagnant family incomes combined with family health-care costs that double every decade — is what America’s middle class should contemplate as it thinks about the imperative of health reform.

Regards,

Jim