Trivializing Death & Despair

August 21, 2009 at 5:09 pm | Posted in health, politics straight up | Leave a comment
Tags: healthcare reform

Two U.S. soldiers looking at dead prisoners on railroad train at unidentified concentration camp in Germany. 1945 April. U.S. Army Signal Corps photo. (Library of Congress)

AKM has a personal story to illustrate the mendacity of Republicans bent on stopping healthcare reform through trivialization of the actions of Hitler and the Nazi Party that you really should read:

I remember as a child I was not allowed to watch Hogan’s Heroes. It wasn’t a joke in my house. There was nothing funny about prisoner of war camps. There were no handsome well-fed prisoners with secret tunnels under their bunks, and pirate radio equipment who always managed to play their captors for the fool. There were frightened, emaciated young men whose minds and bodies were broken an ocean away from home, who were shot on fences , and who ate cats, and watched their friends die. There was nothing to laugh about. Those were Nazis.

Surgery, c.1922 (Library of Congress)

Comparing healthcare reform efforts to Hitler’s policies is one of the more disgusting smears coming from Republicans. It’s shameful that they put their political party ahead of their country and fellow countrymen.

Every evil that the Republicans ascribe to the current healthcare bill is already experienced by Americans under our current for-profit system. Just ask the doctors.

This is because private insurance bureaucracy and paperwork consume one-third (31 percent) of every health care dollar. Streamlining payment through a single nonprofit payer would save more than $400 billion per year, enough to provide comprehensive, high-quality coverage for all Americans.