The State of Health Care (and Other Things) in the US
US health care system was designed explicitly to put people back to work, not to improve quality of life. That’s why health care insurance is generally attached to employment.
At one point, the goal evolved into keeping people alive at any cost, even if it leaves the patient in a state worse than death.
We’ve swung back around to a point where the only people deemed worthy of saving are the wealthy, because they are viewed as God’s favorites (Prosperity Gospel, derived from a certain reading of the Parable of the Talents).
If you are meant to be healthy, God will bless you with good health and the wealth to support it. Conversely, if you become ill or disabled, it’s because you displeased God somehow.
I lived through the AIDS crisis, and the Reagan GOP literally chose to do nothing to control its spread because they viewed it as God’s judgment against the queer communities (and the African populations secondarily).
It was only when it started spreading to the people who were definitionally God’s favorites that they began to take it seriously.
Some amount of this could be seen in the way Covid was handled: if it could be contained within the poor, disabled, elderly, and otherwise undesirable populations, there was no reason to intervene.
That has led to the belief that masking and vaccination are showing a lack of faith in God, so they have gone from common sense public health policy to a great heresy that needs to be criminalized.
Combine all that with the false equivalence on the word 'respect': "If you (an oppressed person) want (your humanity) to be respected, you have to show respect (for the authority of the privileged person, whose humanity is never in question)."
...and after a few generations of this, we have the worst people humanity has to offer demanding loyalty and obedience in exchange for perhaps allowing the rest of us the privilege to live a bit longer (which, of COURSE, they have the authority to grant or revoke).
At one point, the goal evolved into keeping people alive at any cost, even if it leaves the patient in a state worse than death.
We’ve swung back around to a point where the only people deemed worthy of saving are the wealthy, because they are viewed as God’s favorites (Prosperity Gospel, derived from a certain reading of the Parable of the Talents).
If you are meant to be healthy, God will bless you with good health and the wealth to support it. Conversely, if you become ill or disabled, it’s because you displeased God somehow.
I lived through the AIDS crisis, and the Reagan GOP literally chose to do nothing to control its spread because they viewed it as God’s judgment against the queer communities (and the African populations secondarily).
It was only when it started spreading to the people who were definitionally God’s favorites that they began to take it seriously.
Some amount of this could be seen in the way Covid was handled: if it could be contained within the poor, disabled, elderly, and otherwise undesirable populations, there was no reason to intervene.
That has led to the belief that masking and vaccination are showing a lack of faith in God, so they have gone from common sense public health policy to a great heresy that needs to be criminalized.
Combine all that with the false equivalence on the word 'respect': "If you (an oppressed person) want (your humanity) to be respected, you have to show respect (for the authority of the privileged person, whose humanity is never in question)."
...and after a few generations of this, we have the worst people humanity has to offer demanding loyalty and obedience in exchange for perhaps allowing the rest of us the privilege to live a bit longer (which, of COURSE, they have the authority to grant or revoke).
