Many states especially in the South which have large polulations of poor people have been brought up not to be "freeloaders". This goes way back, maybe even to before the Scots Irish (who predominantly settled these areas) came to the US and to the reception they received when they got here.

Casey, I totally get you not wanting a handout and working for what you have, however, for me I think it is a good thing for us to all share the burden of making sure every single US citizen has health insurance. I have also always paid for myself, never taken unemployment etc. I am lucky to have insurance though and even if I have to pay extra taxes, I want us all to. I want YOU to have insurance. :) We all need it.

I know you will agree that when people say Southerner's are lazy and don't want to work, we know that is not true. I think most people given the chance of work they can do well at and make a good living would pick to work. I agree that some people do not have this work ethic. My belief is that some have been so beat down over generations that living off the system seems like a good idea, but for most of us, really, we would rather go to work every day.

Think about what a burden would be lifted if we all shared in making sure every single US citizen had insurance. How many Mothers and Dads would sleep better.

For me, it is worth it to help pay for that. I dream of that day.

We don't have to agree, but I do wish you would think about it. :)

At the risk of going all "meta" on everyone here, I think that there's actually another issue that really comprises the elephant in the room. So I'm going to name it (I will call it George, and I will hug it and squeeze it and call it George! Sorry couldn't help myself). The question isn't about taxes, it's about *merit*. Even more than I heard Casey concerns about her taxes, I heard her concerns about lazy people (undeserving) who don't want to work (not meriting help). That was the theme that I kept reading in different words. And it's a question I think is actually at the heart of our current debates about social programs.

I'm willing to bet that Casey does *not* include wounded veterans in her list of lazy people who don't want to work. (I may be wrong here.) I'm willing to bet that she believes that they ARE deserving of medical care and help going to school. This is a position I don't disagree with. The problem seems to be who 'deserves' help. I (and it seems many others) believe that there are people who fall on hard times and what they need from society is a hand back up to their feet. Some of us may have been born into hard times. Some of us may have fallen on hard times one or more times in our youth or later. My position is that despite the fact that there will be people who game the system, we should be a society that has a safety net and the social contract should be like this: "if you cannot do for yourself because you are disabled, we will do for you. If you can do for yourself, but you have fallen on hard times, we will do what it takes to help you get back on your feet. If you were born into hard times, we will not hold you responsible for the circumstances of your birth and we will help you get into a position so your children won't be born into hard times. For that, we expect you to do your best, obey the laws, maybe do something nice for your neighbors once in a while and generally try to leave the place a little cleaner than you found it when you got here."

Others would disagree with that social contract. I don't know precisely what they would replace it with but, for reasons I'll get into later, I think that the harsher we decide society should be the more short-sighted we are being as a culture.

I want to digress about this whole 'rugged individualism' ethic. While on the surface it's admirable, a couple of people (Jess for one) has pointed to the downside of this. Yes, if one *can* do for oneself one should try their best to do so. However, kids in the mix changes the calculus on that one for me. Think about it this way: Which is more admirable? The mother who has a sick child who *refuses* to take that child to the hospital because "I've never taken a thing from anyone" and she has neither the insurance or the cash to pay or the mother who swallows her pride and goes to the hospital and gets her child medical care even if it means having to ask for charity. I would say that latter. Now, that might be self-serving because that mother was me some 20 years ago. My son was two, I was just out of the Army (not by choice), my marriage had just fallen apart and the only job skills I had were what I'd learned at McDonald's and cryptography. I grew up in privilege, believe that sitting on the doorstep of the county welfare office, my son in my lap, waiting for those doors to open, was the most humbling experience of my life. But I *HAD* to. My parents had cut me off, I had no job skills and my ex-husband had less skills than I did and couldn't hold a job to boot! It was humble myself or watch my kid starve. To this day, I still maintain that watching him starve would've been the easier path at the time, I would have had my pride intact.

Back to the issue of merit. Here's why I think having a truly harsh society is against ALL our interests. As long as I could get welfare, food stamps and medicaid I had no reason to steal or turn to other forms of crime. There was an *option* so I never really had to face my son starving--maybe sometimes there was less food, maybe sometimes I went a couple or three days without eating to make things stretch, but I didn't have to turn to stealing bread from the grocery store so my son could eat. But I can well imagine what I might have been driven to had there been no options. And that is the short-sightedness that mystifies me. One, to me obvious, lesson of history is this: as long as people can feed their children, put a roof over their head, give them some kind of bed to sleep in, some clothes on their backs and some shoes on their feet, they are very, very unlikely to revolt. But when people are watching their children starve or die from malnutrition or disease that *could* be cured but they cannot get the cure, they *will* revolt. It seems to me that social welfare in all its forms, is an insurance policy society pays to keep the wolves of temptation to revolution outside the door. It strikes me as short-sighted to not see a lesson that so obviously litters the fields of history (French revolution end-stage Weimer Germany, Zimbabwe at the end of the last century, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and on and on.)



I have to say I so agree with this. At some point you have to have your human reaction and just holler! One of the problems we have right now, as a society, is that we are in the grips of a meme that makes dialog difficult. That meme is that 'facts' are just a synonym for 'opinion'. It's not. Everyone has a right to their own opinions but no one has a right to their own facts. If someone refuses to acknowledge that there's one set of facts about he world, it really DOES feel like talking to a rock.

"key you are an ass hole"..... ~Casey35

Maybe it's just me, but I prefer to not correspond directly to people who call me an asshole.

And excuse me, but you are assuming that Casey did not understand what I was writing? Darling, I am a high school drop out, my vocabulary is not *that* advanced. Who exactly is being condescending to who?

Casey has been asked very direct very simple questions to which she has refused to answer. Instead she resorts to name calling. There is no point for me to address her directly anymore. But I do not believe that she is the only one with her fears and freak outs (mostly due to conservative media's Misinformation and Propaganda Machine). I would like to learn how to talk to people like her.

So what is your suggestion for when someone calls you an asshole and refuses to answer simple questions about their beliefs and opinions?

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To be honest key, after she said she had left the conversation, I would have dropped it. I try when I can to help people see things from perhaps a different point of view than their own frame of reference. Sometimes I don't execute it very well. At some point I just give up, especially after someone has either made an afront to me or asked me to disengage. I will respect that.

We all have relatives or neighbors or someone we know who we argue with about just about anything political. Sometimes it feels like pulling your hair out trying to get them to hear what you are saying. It hurts and can be exasperating to continue to try to make someone "hear" something other than what is firmly implanted in their head.

I truly do believe you were trying your best to engage. I have seen nothing from you that would suggest otherwise. I don't think the name calling toward you was deserved. That kinda tosses anyones argument out the window in my opinion and at least for me, closes that door of communication.

I get called lovely names for attempting to try to help some folks see something different. It can enrage me. It can hurt. What it cannot do is force my hand or my mind to do anything other than keep trying. I eventually learn that some folks will just never see anything or any point of view other than their own. My best option is to continue trying elsewhere.

The energy you have put into this discussion tells me you do care. My own investment in conversations that are important to me can sometimes feel very sad. I try like hell to see all sides and it is really difficult when engaging with others who can't. I try add helpful items, but ya know, sometimes they are overlooked or dismissed and all that is focused on is the negative counterproductive position of folks stuck in their own frame of reference.

Anyway, don't give up being open minded. I know you are and appreciate it a lot. Sometimes ya just got know when to fold 'em.

As far as this law goes, I have consulted an atty and have found out what legally I need to do to protect my home so I can now join the ranks of those who cannot afford care and use the resources available to get help. I still do not understand why politicians make things so much more difficult than the simple common sense book keeping procedures they should be. But hey, they would all be out of work if they actually made things make sense.

2 words - corporate donations

Obama's health care bill,I don't like it.That is all.

Amen and Amen Again Sister!
 

Do you know about www.youstreet.org ?

For a measly $6 a year from every voting age citizen we could publicly fund every Federal Election. NO corporate donations at all.

Of course we have to hand count every paper ballot (instead of outsourcing our votes to private companies).

But once these two item are in place

(heck throw in instant run off voting - so make it 3, oh yeah and repeal Citizen United - 4 - God these Cons have screwed us but good)

Then

maybe then

We the People will have our country back.

two more words.. very true

I'd like to see every election in this country, right down to dog catcher, publicly funded. The millions of dollars that Meg Whitman is wasting in CA right now is beyond disgusting.

jus' checkin' to see how the thread is going. some constructive opinions and good food for thought i hope.

bye
j

I don't even like Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman's ad was so offensive to me that I would never cast a vote for her. Even for dog catcher. Especially for dog catcher.

Not helpful, nor constructive. Why don't you like it? What does it do that you don't like? Or are you just parroting the party line? More information please.

So what precisely would you like to see? What is it that you don't like? How could the bill be better? If you were writing the bill, how would you have written it?

Your saying you don't like it isn't really, ummm, informative. It would be helpful and would move the discussion forward if you were to say *why*. Otherwise, it seems you're just overturning the pot to see what happens next.

I'm curious. This is your third post on this subject and the only one that wasn't a copy-paste of some article somewhere. We know what you think other people think about this bill, what we still don't know is what *you* think about this bill. Pardon me for quibbling about this but I’m far less interested in what you think of the articles written about the bill (clearly you think they are well-written) than I am in what *you* think about the bill. So if it's not too much of an imposition, would you mind telling us what you think about the bill in your own words and why you think that, in your own words? Thanks in advance.

Cheers
Aj

I really don't either to be honest, I think we should have a single payer system.

The new Health Care Bill falls wayyyyyyyyyyy short of where I think it should be and I am very disappointed.

Yes, I understand that a lot of politic-ing had to happen to get what we got, but I wish somehow more could have been done. Way way more.

Yes, I understand that some people are too proud to accept help from the rest of us.

Bottom line though, I believe it is our right to have health-care and know that health-care is provided for EVERYONE in the USA.

I am fine with paying extra taxes to help this happen.

Hi dreadgeek,

I posted the articles as updated information from the news on the days they were released. I started the thread because there seems to be much concern over the health care overhaul and yet, I didn't see or find any thread on this subject. So I thought I would start this thread so that people could express their opinions. I happened to see the first article that i posted and thought it might be a good way to start the thread.

This thread is for the benefit of members who might want open dialogue or to just express their opinions. This thread is NOT for my benefit. I'm unsubscribed and have no desire to express any opinion. I just happened to notice there was a lot of posting so I thought I would drop and read some of the posts.