"Obamacare discourages innovation." said a co-worker of mine today to my surprise. Reading or listening to Fox News will give you the impression that "real-main-street" Americans are against the bill and the only socialist pigs who are for it reside in ivory towers eating Bon-Bons and laughing at Conan O'Brien's new "Self-Pleasuring Panda". We watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and are described by Bill O'Reilly as "stoned slackers". We are elitists that trumpet our credentials in academia as if that gives us a right to dictate life to those less educated. By proxy, the other side is the opposite. They are hard working folks. They put '-cha' on the end of their words (i.e. gotcha and betcha). They listen to Rush Limbaugh for "truth" and understand exactly what the country is thinking and feeling. Presumably because they believe they are the country. Nevermind that this type of "there are two types of people in the world..." thinking is dividing the country deeply.
This lady didn't fit the mold. She works at a large pharmaceutical company. She is extremely educated; in fact she has her ivory dripping Ph.D. I'm not sure, however, if the likes Bon-Bons. She was upset that the new health care bill would remove the incentive for pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs. "Companies exist to make money. They have to make that money to develop the next drug." Fine with me. I don't dispute either fact. The surprise hit me because Big Pharma, the lobbying group for the largest pharmaceutical companies in the US, endorsed the health care bill. Newspapers and websites from The Wall Street Journal to The Huffington Post agreed at least on the Big Pharma's support. Pharmaceutical companies successfully lobbied to increase their patent rights to 12 years for specific types of compounds. They were also successful in defeating an initiative to allow cheaper medications to be imported from abroad. The reality of her viewpoint hit me a helluva lot harder than this guy. She noted that the Canadian pharmaceutical industry had "lost all of the research and development." I would dispute that they are hurting too bad after seeing the Canadian division of Pfizer's $2.228 billion profit last year. "People will pay for erectile dysfunction or baldness medication, but they won't pay $10/month for cholesterol medication," she emphatically stated.
That last statement says so much about the current health care debate. At the end of the day, Americans just aren't sure about paying for someone else to be lazy and stoned on their couch. I get that it goes against our moral fabric, and rightfully so, to pay for some guy to eat potato chips and watch porn while we toil away at work to pay for his lazy ass. But is this what is really going on? Such sociological questions have murky answers at best, but let's give it the old anecdotal story treatment. My grandfather suffered a heart attack a few years back. He retired from Chrysler, and at least until the next screw up, has relatively good health care coverage. Without it, he'd be paying several hundred dollars a month for medications. One medication, he says, is over $200/month. Could this be the crux of our problem in talking about health care reform? Regardless of your agreement or disagreement with this specific bill, I get the feeling that many still feel reform itself isn't needed at all. Could it be that people, even very educated and intelligent people, are so in the dark about the realities of life for so many Americans that they just don't see the need for reform? Or, perhaps, they never took the time to learn because they were so concerned with Sarah Palin's death-panels.
Remarkably, conservatives are able to use buzz words like "death panels" to invoke a certain fear. This fear is really powerful because it causes people to act against their self-interest AND the interest of those immediately around them. The health care bill will close the moronic Medicare Part D "doughnut hole", and yet elderly people in my own family believed the bill was set up to kill them off as efficiently as possible.
Listen folks, don't believe the bullshit. Glenn Beck doesn't really give a damn. He doesn't really cry on the air. The people with the money are spending lots of it to ensure that you believe they are looking out for you. The CEO of Lilly Corp struggled through a $20 million salary last year (which included only a 44% raise from the year before) even though the company was cutting 5500 jobs. When asked about it on his blog, he could only state that he asked for no raise and the board of directors decide what he gets paid. I'm not sure what's worse, that he thinks we are dumb enough to believe that he reluctantly accepted a $8.8 million dollar raise or that a group of idiots felt that it was warranted when the company is cutting 5500 jobs.
These are the people who are crying foul when Obama suggests regulation of banks or forming consumer advocacy boards. These are the people who tell you, and all their employees, that the country is against health care reform. If I put a piece of blue paper in my pocket and tell everyone in the world that it is yellow. Then I poll everyone and they overwhelmingly say it is yellow. Well, that doesn't make that piece of paper any less blue now does it. Don't believe the bullshit. The bill may not be perfect, but it is good for you and me.
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