He was speaking to another hand-picked audience of yahoos and suck-ups, this time in obvious panicked response to Michael Moore's brilliant Sicko, but without actually addressing his points. Of course Bush hasn't seen the movie -- he's just advocating the Republican/corporate Democratic line of off-loading risk from our nation's pooled resources onto individual Americans.
Government programs that lock you in to private health care! Control those costs...by limiting your right to sure for mismanagement and malpractice! Fuck you, American citizen!
It strikes me that The Big Lie of this rhetoric is an embedded assumption at the beginning of the segment:
"The objective has got to be to make sure that America is the best place in the world to get health care."I don't actually believe it. I think the objective is make America a good or great place to get health care -- it doesn't actually have to be the best in the world. We're #37 right now. I'd be a lot happier with #8, even. This "best" fixation is part of the American Exceptionalism fallacy, like we're somehow touched by God and our shit doesn't stink like any other industrialized nation's. Hey, we're all flawed. Just take the thieves out of the equation.
Then he states his true goal as health monopoly tool:
"The immediate goal is to make sure more people are on private health plans."Sure, sell more indentured servitudes to Kaisers.
In fact, as you listen to his argument after having seen Sicko, the video takes a stark turn into overdetermined speech. Bush claims to be in favor of some children and old folks getting public health assistance -- he's just against all the rest of us getting the help we need. In fact, as you listen to his crazy "plan", it sounds more and more like the complicated formulas Hillary Clinton was (rightly, in my view, although I opposed the overall demonization of her effort) criticized for when she tried to create a national system back in the early 1990's. It's exceptions here, incentives there, cover you who need here, cut back accountability there...it's a parody of a complicated liberal government nannystate program.
Once you simplify the health care question down to one of the government serving the people rather than for-profit managed care cartels, the rest is just anecdotal. Cut out the profit motive, pay doctors out of taxes, suddenly you jet-fuel the economy by taking the stress out of everyone's life so they can be more productive, and open up employment fungibility so that people can move around to different jobs without worrying that won't be able to afford his digitalis at the next one.
Yesterday I linked (thanks to Crooks & Liars) to Michael Moore savaging Wolf Blitzer for having run Dr. Sanjay Gupta's hit piece just before their interview. That was "Part I" and here's "Part II", although as de-mystified-in-chief Moore reveals, it was all shot in the same session. Moore has calmed down in this one which may appeal to folks who don't like Moore when he's so strident, but the message is the same: truth to power, and Wolf is just a functionary of the power elite.
It turns out there's email evidence that Dr. Gupta received the correct information before altering it in his set-up piece.
Maybe Moore is obnoxious. Maybe he's not in particularly good health himself. Maybe he's just a working class guy who got lucky and turned into the most successful populist documentarian in film history.
But in comparison, Mistah Bush just does The Devil's work.
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