Yesterday I sat at a bar chatting with friends - this is my favorite kind of chatting. No gossip, no bitching, just good conversation covering everything from football to health care. During this conversation, people were commenting that older people or Americans who don't have a problem with Medicare should be totally on board with health care - and I thought at first blush, this is a legitimate argument. But this morning, while up at 4am because I am 2 weeks away from delivery, I decided it wasn't really all that legitimate. Here are my 2 points.
First, Medicare can be argued to have been designed (as was Social Security in some ways) to provide for women who chose not to have careers, never earned money for themselves and raised their families while their husbands went out and earned the bread. These women were fulfilling what had been known as the Republican Mother ideal - doing their job to raise the next generation of citizens rather than developing a career. Their husbands die first - as is often the case - and they have no independent means to take care of themselves. Or there are women who never married but were relegated to the pink ghetto for their entire lives which does not generally include good pensions. These women do not deserve to not have health care when they are old or to have to rely on the kindness of children or strangers to maintain their health. Thus the government steps in to provide for those whom society expected something else from.
Second, the unemployment rate today is 9.7% which means 90% of available people are working. These people will pay into Medicare their entire lives and they deserve to reap what they have sown. They hit 65 and they get to be rewarded for a lifetime of work by not having to work anymore but not having to worry about health care.
Neither of these options cover poor people or people who have children without having waited until they could afford them. Thus - being old and opposed to government health care and in favor of Medicare is not a double standard.
All this being said - I think government should provide a safety net for all its citizens, its poor and children most specifically and I would argue this has nothing to do with age or societal expectations - but that social rights should be as guaranteed as civil and political rights. But that's an entirely different argument.
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4 comments:
you're smart
LOL....
Ok, exept that the most prevalent argument I hear is that the government can't run a health care program.... and from seniors, quite often.
Also, my understanding was that Medicare was created to elminate the problem of indigent elderly people. Once you were too old to work at your industrial job you were screwed, so the government decided to establish this safety net if your union bennies didn't cover you. Not just women, because you had an awful lot of old men in the situation.
But yes, you are smart. And pretty.
Right - medicare was designed for those people who have worked their entire lives - but originally all social security programs were designed for widows, so they can be traced to that argument.
Seniors who are saying that about health care are in the very slight minority - AARP is totally behind the Obama plan because they know they get great deals with Medicare - social security and medicare have highest public approval ratings among seniors for policies.
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