Healthcare madness

I'm still recovering from Death Plague '09. It has royally sucked, let me tell you, folks. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Maybe it's having been this sick these past 2 weeks, and without insurance, that has focused my brain, insofar as it can focus on anything, on the whole health care reform debate. I can't say I have anything particularly brilliant to say about it. Mostly what I feel is a simmering anger -- an anger that I had to make choices these past 2 weeks that probably prolonged my agony, simply because of simple issues of money. Probably because I was, and am, well aware of just how sick I was, and how bad it was that I wasn't going to a doctor. I take this issue very personally. I work my ass off, and yet I can't get the most basic of health care in this country.

Mostly, though, I've been half-watching this whole town hall thing, and the utter madness engulfing the conservative elements in our culture, and despairing. This whole debate is showing so clearly how little rational thought is used in American politics. It's showing how divided and extreme things are getting. We're not talking minor divisions here -- we're talking the kind of divisions that back in the day ended up with people being tied to stakes and lit on fire. The rhetoric is mad. The lies are outrageous. The willingness to believe the lies, to not even question them, that is the real kicker, though. A whole segment of the population is proving how little they actively engage their brains.

Not that the other side gets off easily, though. One thing that has been striking me, listening to the fear-mongering from the right, is how much is sounds like the extreme liberal fear-mongering from during the Bush years. Internment camps! Nazis! Death panels!

I have no answers here. We're at a perilous point here -- a government in huge financial trouble, facing real issues of importance, including Health Care Reform (an important part of getting the financial problems under control). We have wars to be dealt with. We have infrastructure problems, international crises, and more. Perhaps more than at any point in U.S. history, we need to be stepping back and engaging our brains. Making decisions based on careful analysis and reason, instead of fear. Instead -- madness.

Maybe it's the last remnants of the sickness speaking, but right now I fear for my country. It feels like we are sliding into an abyss of hatred and fear and division.