August 18, 2009

The Health Care Debate: I Don't Understand It

This morning I decided I should put a blog post that wasn't college-related or a funny picture, and set off reading my blog roll trying to find something I might want to comment on. I found a bunch of posts on the health care reform stuff, which you may have noticed has been rather big news lately - not the actual contents of the bill so much, no one really cares about those, but the things people say on Twitter about it and the fact that pseudo-grassroots-y protests of conservative crazy have been going on, complete with people carrying (legal) assault rifles and horribly misspelled signs.

Actually, a blog post about how the media's dealt with the not-so-spontaneous demonstrations outside of town halls would be interesting. But I found a bunch of posts about the actual contents of the bill, and decided to check those out instead.

I proceeded to get really confused.

Here's one about the dead public option and how we don't need it anyway, and here's another one about consumer protection in the bill. It all sounds good - no discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, no gender discrimination, no dropping coverage for the seriously ill - but shouldn't it be like that anyway? Everything I know about the health care system I learned from that movie Sicko, so I get that it's messed up, but if these basic things are the awesome reform we're working on it must be pretty seriously messed up. And what about uninsured people, again?

The bill that's being debated right now is a thousand-some pages, and rather complicated. This is, perhaps, which media coverage has focused almost exclusively on rumors and protests. But because of that we're not getting a clear idea of what the problems we're trying to fix are, and how we're going about it. Fail.

So then I gave up on blogs and turned to Washington Post, which ran an article about how video games can help mental illness. This is awesome, and I think health care reform should cover a new PS3 for me.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Did you hear the one about the people comparing Obama to Hitler?
People are just being selfish capitalists if you ask me.