Health Care Reform: The Little Bloodmobile that Could… or How To De-rail the Democratic Process.

I understand all the frustration and fear about reforming the Health Care System. Change is scary. Why change something that we have put up with for a very long time? Why make health care socialized?

Socialism… This word strike fear in the hearts of Americans and many people don’t even know what it means. I have no fear of the word. In fact I would like to embrace this word, even use it to say “I want Socialized Health Care.” But I am getting ahead of myself. We should start back at square one and just define the word Socialism.

Dictionary.com defines it as follows:

1. a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

2. procedure or practice in accordance with this theory.

3. (in Marxist theory) the stage following capitalism in the transition of a society to communism, characterized by the imperfect implementation of collectivist principles.

Well we can ignore the 2^nd meaning of this as really it has no bearing on this argument. But I will start at the end with definition number 3. This is what really scares people. It is the idea that our country will turn into a communist state if we start to implement socialized institutions. Let’s look at the largest example of Communism in our world today, China.

The country with the second highest GDP in the world, after the US, is the People’s Republic of China. Arguably the poster child for Communism, China has slowly shifted from a planned economy to a rapidly growing market economy. Most communist economies have been shifting back toward a market economy since establishment.

The trend of modern economies is a hybrid socialist-free market economy. Not wholly free market not wholly socialist. These economies usually thrive because they allow competition within the market but still limited in power to protect the consumer. Basically the point is that most economies are in a constant state of flux somewhere between socialism and free market. A small shift either way should not bring the economy crashing down.

The next argument is about socialist programs in general. We as a society already have various social programs in place that we are more than fond of. Not to say that they don’t have their own problems but again, the argument is about socialized healthcare not the various socialized programs I am about to list off.

Here goes, the obvious ones: Medicare/Medicaid, Social Security, and Welfare. Oh no, but some of you don’t like these programs and could do without. How about some of these less than obvious, dreadful Socialized programs: the evil Police department, the careless fire department, the inept public school system, and worst of all the defilers of this country… the Military. See I can make any socialized program sound bad with a few choice adjectives.

See these are some of well the rational arguments that people could be using when trying to talk about Health Care Reform. Instead we have derailed from proper political discourse and civil speech and crashed into what we see today, “hatespeech”.