If there's one issue where you could walk the street and get a mostly consensus opinion, it's health insurance. You'd have a hard time finding anyone in the over-30 crowd that hasn't had a bad experience with their health insurer or knows someone.
You'd have a hard time finding someone not frustrated by the fact that if they leave their job that their only option for preserving their health coverage for the next one or two months is to buy into a massively overprices COBRA plan.
There's also businesses that won't give you health benefits for 3, 4, 5, and even 6 months. If you get them at all. And, if you're in that group, you know that getting health insurance outside of a group plan is generally a disaster: Your choices are expensive, you don't have an HR manager to figure out what's best for the group as a whole, and if you have a pre-existing condition: you're fucked.
So, it's so incredibly sad, and pathetic, to see this small minority of rabid, right-wing loonies fight health insurance reform tooth and nail. There are comparisons of Obama to...Hitler. HITLER?! Hitler never fought for healthcare for his countrymen, he put them in fucking GAS CHAMBERS! These people are disrupting town halls, starting fights, bringing guns and making death threats. They don't want dialogue, they want anarchy.
Sarah Palin and her ilk have taken this further -- and to a far more dangerous point. One of the provisions in the plan is that end-of-life discussions are covered by insurance. These are talks that doctors have with patients' families to discuss options when death is likely. This involves hospice care, drug usage, "pulling the plug", etc. In other words, American families have these now, and they are often not covered or the doctor does it voluntarily.
What are Sarah Palin and her other disgusting cronies saying about this? They call them "death panels" and say these discussions are government deciding if your grandparents are worthy to live. This is disgusting and the crazies suck it up. Is it true? Absolutely not. Does it matter? Not to these people.
And it's why they got voted out in the first place.
But, what is it all really? Here's what's happened. Over the last 10-15 years, the cooks have gravitated and voted for the politicians who have been the most "crazy" in the Republican Party. The ones who are most ideologically anti-tax and anti-choice. Now, over time, the Republicans are left with Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, James Inhofe and other nutballs to represent them in a time when Democrats want to go to universal health coverage.
It's akin to letting your Army stagnate by not sending them to the gym or training them effectively. War has begun, and you have a bunch of idiots standing between you and your goals.
So, the Republicans will see universal coverage instituted. They can't make any coherent argument against it. The American people are laughing at them. And rightly so.
It's just too bad this will benefit them. Ah, well.
