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“People Could Die and That’s OK”: Why the Right’s Free-Market Health Philosophy Is Ludicrous
February 3, 2015
It was startling to see physician and Senator Rand Paul claim the other day that
people on disability were faking bad backs and anxiety to get on the
dole and cheat the taxpayers. These are real ailments, sometimes totally
debilitating, as anyone who has suffered from either can tell you.
Severe back pain can make it impossible to work at any job, even those
which only require sitting. Anxiety disorder is a terrible condition
that can even make some people unable to even leave their house. What
kind of medical doctor would deny such a thing? (If you answered, “one
who will willingly trade his professional integrity for political
points” you’d be right.)But this is actually part of the GOP’s ongoing quest to degrade “entitlements” and make America’s health care system the worst in the world for anyone who isn’t wealthy. Their ongoing attack on Obamacare opened up a window to their underlying philosophy about affordable health care. (They’re not for it.) And now they are taking legislative aim at the Supplemental Security Income portion of the Social Security System. This is the program that makes it possible for people with disabilities to live without begging on the streets. Despite the fact that the congress has always routinely pushed money back and forth between the retirement and disability portions of the program as the need occurred, the Republicans in congress have decided that they no longer support doing such a thing. The result, if they have their way, would be to cut the meager stipends of millions of disable Americans within the next year.
They claim that the program is rife with fraud and that far too many people are able bodied and just refuse to work. (They haven’t used the term “disability queen” in public yet, but you can be sure they’ve thought it.) Representative Tom Price, another erstwhile medical professional committed to proving that trusting a Republican doctor to treat you is like asking a convicted robber to house sit,
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