In ancient times, if the messenger brought the King bad news, the King might kill him. But at least the King always read the message first! Today, we don’t bother. If the messenger has a foul appearance, that unfortunate is killed without even a glance at the message. We judge the message – unread – by the messenger.
We do the converse as well. We simply accept something said by someone we like or whom we respect without weighing it carefully, without considering the possibility they might be wrong or (heaven forbid) mendacious.
We all pigeon-hole ourselves in numerous ways: political (liberal or conservative); religious (Christian; Muslim; non-believer; etc); location (American; southerner; or best of all, New Yorker); fiscal (conservative or liberal, whatever they mean); etc. We then ‘hear’ those with similar labels and ignore those with opposite labels.
To make things easy for ourselves, we see black or white, good or bad, no grey tones, no colors and certainly no change over time. “Birds of a feather tend to flock together.” We associate with like people both physically and mentally. Read Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds” or any textbook in psychology or organizational behavior. They all describe how bad groupthink is.
Many years ago, I had a colleague who was a real jerk (“jerk” is used here in place of a more appropriate but foul-mouthed adjective starting with “a.”) Everything he said put my teeth on edge. If he said it, I did not hear it because he was so…self-important. The problem was that he was smart and sometimes he was right. I learned a valuable lesson.
Listen to and evaluate the message rather than the messenger.
Congressman Phil Roe (R-Tenn.) just circulated a memo on the Healthcare Reform Bill presently under discussion. I have reproduced it below in italics.
When the President pledges that reform “will not add to the deficit, not even a little,” he neglects to mention that the House Leadership plan would increase the deficit by $239 billion over 10 years, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.
What’s worse is that the President is insisting that middle-class families won’t see a tax increase – as he did repeatedly during his recent appearance on ABC’s This Week. From my perspective, it does not seem as if he has thoroughly evaluated the legislation.
On page 167 of H.R. 3200, the title of section 401 reads: “TAX ON INDIVIDUALS WITHOUT ACCEPTABLE HEALTH CARE COVERAGE.” Associated Press didn’t mince words when it began a fact check piece, “Memo to President Obama: it’s a tax.”
I believe that if the President reads these bills closely, he’d also find that his pledge to protect seniors’ Medicare benefits rings hollow. According to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, House Democrats’ plan cuts Medicare Advantage programs by more than $172 billion.
As a result, six million seniors could be denied access to an affordable Medicare Advantage (MA) plan, including three million who could lose the plan they currently have, according to an analysis completed by Republicans on the House Ways & Means Committee. Furthermore, the House Democrats’ bill includes a total of more than $500 billion in Medicare cuts, which could mean reduced benefits and fewer choices for seniors.
Clearly there is a partisan (Republican) tone to this memo. Nonetheless, our important concern should be the message not the messenger. Whatever Rep. Roe’s motives, did he write truly? If so, we should heed the message (regardless of messenger). If not, we can ignore it.
We owe it to ourselves to consider the message above without reference to our party affiliation, biases, or current position on the proposed Healthcare Reform Bill
What do you think?
System MD
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Remember that part about universal access to wellness care? No deductibles? I read a good bit of the thing. Wellness care = annual physical, mammograms & pap smears for women, DRE for men, vaccines as advised by CDC. There’s no mention of chronic illness care, yet on many chronic illness boards, they were convinced Obamacare was going to help them with their illnesses.
Yet, on the first page, there is “cost sharing” mentioned. Annually, an individual has to ante up $5K & a family, $10K, towards healthcare costs for anything not covered under wellness care. The chronic illness sufferers on the board ignored my pointing that out & providing the link to the bill. But it means what it says: a $5K deductible for one person, $10K for a family, before you get any “free” healthcare. That’s the same deductible – oops, cost sharing – that was in the so-called health insurance offered to managers of MacDonald’s restaurants – a deductible for which politicians raised h-e-double hockey sticks when whipping up a frenzy aimed at trying to get socialized medicine in the US.
So, why again is this high level deductible – oops, cost sharing – OK for Obamacare but a travesty for MacDonald’s to do?
Thankfully, by now that particular bill is gone – but in its place is a kluge of 4 sucky Senate bills – a mess that has so many pages it stands about 10 inches tall lying on a table. Makes “War & Peace” look like a brochure.
And people, including our elected representatives, are more likely to read “War & Peace” than they are to wade through a massive amount of political doublespeak that looks like a paper version of a Joe Biden filibuster. It’ll be so internally inconsistent that no one will be able to figure it out.
In other words, it makes the tax code look simple to understand.
They’ll vote it in if we don’t fight it, because their constituents want “something done about healthcare.” It’ll cost so much they’ll have to ration no matter what version gets passed; the bureaucratic doublespeak alone will require Special High Intensity Training (read the acronym, please).
There are all these undesirables out there who can’t seem to get thin, quit smoking, stop drinking, or quit drugging. We can start with them, moving on to the 53% of the population with chronic illnesses. From there, you have a choice of knocking off people with incurable illnesses & people who need care (intellectually challenged, psychologically unstable), perhaps even prisoners – where it’ll also reduce prison overcrowding. Decimate the population, omit anyone with diseases, until you have just a few healthy people left. Cuts costs, really quickly. No more medical supply places, gimps on mobility aids or in wheelchairs (manual or power), “retards” or fat people to look at, just beautiful people.
It may be tongue in cheek now, but I wonder if it will end up being prophecy.
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