Our problem with the health care debate of course is a matter of huge misinformation. I am getting annoyed about this too. Indeed, it seems as though we Americans have managed to hold contradictory positions.
Take for example Nate Silver's graphic here.
It just does not make sense. It makes almost as much sense as the claims of "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which happens to be a big single payer system.
Now Silver's post that I stole said image from talks about misinformation about Canada and the UK. Again we hold somewhat impossible positions together. Republicans talk on and on about the whole notion of rationing care, but they rail against deficits (need I remind people that this party had a huge poorly designed entitlement expansion and they also created tax cuts that were irresponsible).
We Americans seem to want to have our cake and eat it too. We want lower taxes, but do not cut my funding for x, y, and z. We want to have everyone covered and we seemingly hate the insurance companies, but God forbid we let the government do anything.
Then again, holding such contradictory positions may just be a result of our wiring in our brains and our situation. Indeed, to go off on a tangent, the sex scandals of the moralists show this, as The Situationist explains.
Our situations then have taught us that largess from the government is desirable, and that we deserve that largess, or we just ignore that it comes from the government. Our situation teaches us that government is evil and cannot do anything right, and taxes are horrific (we compare them to death all the time). Reactance to the situation actually leads to some of these positions that are logically impossible to reach viability.
I do not know how any of this helps, but I just felt as though I had to say something.
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