I heard Ashton Kutcher on Bill Maher launch into a diatribe that I've been hearing a lot recently. Here's David Horowitz describing it:
Kutcher put forth sensible views and engaging, informed opinions on the issue of health care which brought some consensus to the table.
Discussing the issue of a greater need for an emphasis on promoting wellness instead of just treating sickness, Kutcher expressed a view on socialized medicine that hasn’t been discussed as much as it should:
“Frankly, I don’t want to pay for the guy who’s getting a triple-bypass because he’s eating fast food all day and deep-fried snickers bars. I don’t want to pay for him! Whether he’s wealthy or he’s not!”
He’s right. Should the taxpayer have to pay for other people’s unhealthiness? Should the taxpayer pay for the guy who smokes four packs of cigarettes a day and then gets emphysema?
This isn't confined to to the far right and arrogantly fatuous celebrities. I was asked the same thing at Drinking Liberally by someone who felt the same way.
It’s not just fat people and smokers - promiscuous gays with AIDS, promiscuous heterosexuals with STDs, drunks injured in car crashes,...the list goes on & on.
Here are my favorite comments, which demonstrate wingnut incoherence on health care perfectly:
We all know that our grandparents visited a doctor only a few times in their whole lives. Allowing the government to take control will send us all down a path where a medtech behind a bullet-proof glass with dictate who is or is not served by the last living doctor in each socialist locality.
And:
“I take as my individual Christian responsibility to feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked and care for the sick - and so do a lot of other Americans. It’s called charity.”
we need to do more than charity. We need to push people so that they can sustain themselves so that they won’t have to depend on anyone, private charity or govt.
You see, the problem comes down to liberals wanting to take money from the "good people" to pay for the "bad people" and deny the "good people" health care for themselves. So, we need to go back to a time when nobody saw doctors (and grandma just kicked the bucket at 62 or so, thus relieving anyone of having to make those "end of life" choices.) And we also need to "push" people to stop getting sick or at least push them to become multimillionaires so they can afford to pay for their own health care if the insurance companies decide not to cover them. How this "push" is to be accomplished is anybody's guess, but I would suppose it has something to do with the second amendment. They are quite sure that the government is going to ration health care, something they obviously believe is a good idea but which should be left up to ... them, I guess.
Evidently, these people all believe that if you get sick you either did something to deserve it, in which case you also deserve to go bankrupt even if you have insurance -- or, if you are a "good" person, perhaps you can be taken care of by charities, at least until they "push" you out. On their planet, there are no insurance companies denying care to people, no decent hard working Americans losing everything they have to a health crisis, nobody tied to a job they hate because they won't be able to get insurance if they leave, no CEOs making sickening profits while people suffer, no health care inflation making it impossible for businesses to compete. On their planet it cannot happen to them.
Here's a "great American" being cheered on for saying he needs nothin' from nobody and a slavering mob, including a US Congressman, cheering him on:
I am not the type of person to wish that someone would get sick and lose everything they have, but if I were, these are people I would wish it on. It's a hateful thing to say, but these are hateful people and I'm not going to pretend they aren't just to be politically correct. Watch the fevered looks on their faces, high fiving and stimulated to near hysteria at the notion that they are completely self-sufficient and need not care for their fellow man. It's quite clear that they have no empathy at all and therefore must personally experience things in order to understand them. I certainly can't see much hope of rationally explaining why they themselves are likely to suffer under their own philosophy and I wouldn't even bother trying to appeal to them on grounds of being a decent human being.
I guess they think they are immortal. Clearly they believe they are superior. But contrary to this self-destructive, unenlightened worldview, many of them are going to be disabled or stricken with illness and if they are lucky they will get old and infirm. And I hate to break it to them, but every last one of these people, good or bad, fat or thin, rich or poor, is going to die someday. Being a selfish jackass won't save any of them from that fate.