Protests Against Health Care Reform: Misguided?

We are seeing so many lists, upon entering a new year and a new decade: the bests and worsts of the year and of the decade recently ended.

I just saw a list of the ten dumbest things said in 2009. One was a protest sign reading "Government hands off my Medicare." Okay, if you need a second to see what is wrong with that, it's that Medicare is a government program.

Do we presume the person holding that sign didn't know that? That depends on how dumb you are prepared to believe people are. Maybe, to be charitable, the person just meant, "I like my Medicare as it is, so I hope that health-care reform laws won't do anything to change Medicare for the worse." (See, I always want to give people the benefit of the doubt. And slogans, whether chanted or on signs, are always brief and oversimplify the issues.)

In either event--whether this was actually pretty mindless, or a reasonable concern--as I've said before, special interests, who don't want changes that would benefit the majority if it might adversely impact them, are behind these demonstrations, are recruiting the "teabaggers"--people who might be not thinking very carefully or are misinformed--and using them as their dupes. If ordinary people are afraid of changes coming to health care, it may be because they are afraid of change or because they have been falsely led to believe that the changes will be bad--for instance, Sarah Palin wrongly saying that there would be "death panels."

But don't get me started on Sarah Palin.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein