Cognitive Dissonance

Good Lord. Palin has referred to "Obama's Death Panel"--the fear-claim that pretends our elderly would be at risk under government-funded health care--ignoring the fact that our elderly already have socialized medicine and are very happy with it--and not in fear of their lives because of their government-funded Medicare. I guess the anti-government-funding crowd thinks our elderly would be better off with for-profit health care that promotes capitalist (rather than socialist) values--even if it means our elderly can't afford medications or medical care. (Wait--am I going mad?--or did the word think escape my lips?)

Palin claims that a government-funded plan would threaten health care for her son--but this ignores the fact that so many special needs children are already on Medicaid because private insurance discriminates against them. Our current insurance system considers Down's syndrome a pre-existing condition. Those who promote capitalist values by dissing what they call socialist medicine should be honest about their value system. This values profit over social justice.

A decade ago, when our HMO changed its system and refused to pay for my husband's oncologist--who was covered under their system, but was not in our "network" within their system--I switched plans and never insured him under HMO again. But even with the more expensive PPO system, we ran into difficulty when St. Ed's had a provider for one year that wouldn't cover M.D. Anderson. For-profit insurance was so expensive for us that we had to declare bankruptcy when he had to quit working and go on disability. Hooray for capitalist values?

Even more ironic to me is that Palin represents the anti-choice block of voters who want the government to decide who will maintain a pregnancy. And this group overlaps with those who don't want the government to step in and see to it that every unborn receives prenatal care--because that would promote socialist values rather than capitalist values.

Cognitive dissonance?