Pulling Plugs

The right-wing hijacking of the health care debate depresses me, as if the weather and the problems I've had with my car and with my job search weren't depressing enough. Right now, the reactionaries in America are trying - successfully, so far -to derail the health care debate by exploiting the provision that facilitates living will preparations, and preventing an intelligent discussion on how to reduce costs so that we don't spend any more on health care than other countries do. But then, in America, discouraging intelligent debate is easy.

Many lies have been told about the living will provision, most of which have implied that the government would deny care to elder Americans and encourage folks to "pull the plug on Grandma," and no matter how much health care reform proponents expose these claims as lies, the liars - including noted book-banning wolf killer Sarah Palin - scream louder. They're trying to pull the plug on health care reform.

They've even belittled the British health care system by bemoaning the idea that physicist and Lou Gehrig's disease sufferer Stephen Hawking would have been allowed to die under it . . . even though he's British and has benefited from it immensely.

I've only had health insurance as an adult when I've worked at a permanent job, and my employment has been so erratic for the past six years, I've mostly worked temporary jobs. So I have no health insurance now. If I become catastrophically ill in an America where Republican health care values prevail, I might as well just drop dead.

And then I won't have to listen to this death panel nonsense anymore.