Health (we don't) Care

Maggie Williams, Hilary Clinton’s chief of staff, once said, “Any time you start down the road of messing with people’s money, they have to kill you,”...well that, or they have to threaten to kill grandma.

It's hard to escape the fact that (American) politics is an incredibly ridiculous process, but lately it feels like the debate over health care has exceeded the limits of absurdity and has well entered the realm of perverse deceit and disregard. There's a lot at stake when it comes to health care reform, so it seems obvious, if not completely understandable, that the conversation has become...colorful, but the thing that scares me about this particular debate is that it seems to be as equally jittery as it is hostile. The amount of indignant confusion that is permeating the health care debate has created a dyad of aggression and extreme anxiety, which has resulted in the materialization of contempt; and that has forced this debate to become less and less about health care and more and more about rhetoric.

The further we get into the health care debate, the more heartsick I become. I have faith in humanity and I believe that no matter how we feel or what has happened, we care about one another...but is it becoming increasingly obvious that we don't? Seriously, is anyone even bothering to listen anymore?

Honestly, I'm on the fence about this health care bill...I assuredly think we need reform, things can't just stay the way they are, but, for one, I don't completely understand Obama's plan (and it's not because I'm dense or for lack of trying) and two, what I do understand seems short-sighted, if not naive...but there is one point of contention that is especially infuriating for me; the argument that health care reform is unethical because conservatives don't want to pay for the abortions that they don't believe in.

I think that it's so infuriating for me, because it feels vaguely familiar.

***(Let me first say this: The opposition to health care reform, that has stemmed because of the issue of abortion, argues that this bill will increase abortions. Do people realize or understand that the number one reason that women choose abortion rather than adoption is because of medical bills? So...it seems to reason that if women had the help and support that they needed to pay their medical bills, to see a doctor, to gain emotional support, etc. it would actually decrease the number of abortions. When did it become ethically acceptable to stop using your brain and just spew whatever tactical rhetoric you think will best suite your agenda? This kind of behavior is certainly unacceptable, yet we hold no one accountable?!)***

As a gay woman, I intimately understand what it feels like to have your voice invalidated because of something that you believe in (for me that's being exactly who are without internal or external judgment), and now those same people, that, for the most part, are the ones abating my voice, are the ones crying wolf; but the possibility that those people will now see things from my marginalized viewpoint seems impossible, and the thing that really gets me about all of this, is that it's done under the disguise of patriotism, but that is so NOT what America is all about.

We set sail because we were tired of being told how to live; we created our own declaration because we were tired of playing by other people's rules; we fought back because we were tired of "taxation, without representation"...but now we've become selfish and stubborn and elitist and completely unwilling to look beyond ourselves, and it feels more and more like we've forgotten all about the things that got us here in the first place.

I'm not going to pretend that I have some kind of foolproof solution to health care reform, because I so clearly don't, but what I do have is the basic understanding that we, as a country, aren't going to get anywhere if we don't start listening to each other. Rather than working backwards and talking over one another and making up lies that just further our own personal agendas, let's try to make health care about...oh I don't know...care!

P.S. I can think of one easy way to expand health care without reconstructing the entire system. Repeal DOMA. Enact domestic partner laws in all 50 states. Seriously! We gays make up 10% of the population. That's two fucking birds with one stone.