Warning: political rant

Sometimes the ignorance and gullibility of large swaths of the American populace fill me with despair. The current shouting matches taking place all across the country concerning the health care reform bill are a good case in point.

First there is the nonsense about what Sarah Palin calls the government death squads. When you get old somebody from the government is going to come around and ask you how you want to die. Actually, if you think about it rationally (which those people who will believe any scare tactics the wealthy insurance companies care to throw at them, all too often fail to do), this wouldn't be a bad idea. Americans persist in pretending they're never going to die, when as a matter fact death is the one indisputable fact of life; and it would be much better if people made proper arrangements for this fact before it was too late and their families were stuck with making heart-wrenching decisions with no guidance. However, that's not the point. The point is that the bills before Congress propose nothing of the sort. They propose including payment to doctors for counseling on end-of-life care. If you become incapacitated do you want everything possible done to sustain life, or do you want, instead, a living will? At what point do you want all aggressive therapy to stop, and hospice care to take over? Etc., etc. None of this would be done by govern-ment "bureaucrats," but by doctors, who are, after all, sworn to "first, do no harm." They wouldn't be encouraging you to let yourself be euthanized, they would be encouraging you to think intelligently and sensibly about these important matters while you're still in good enough shape to make the necessary decisions.

And then there's all the milarky about how if we're not careful we'll have a terrible, uncaring health system like they have in England and Canada -- whose citizens are now expressing anger at how those systems are being misrepresented by the ads here. My English friends Ann and John had two children and didn't pay a dime to have them. As Ann said to me, "I can't imagine going through child birth, and all the adjustments connected with having a baby, and coming home to huge hospital bills as well!" Both she and John have leveled criticisms at the NHS on occasion -- like any system it is not perfect -- but both are basically highly supportive of it, as are most of the citizens of the U.K. But because we are, as a country, essentially ignorant of what life is like in other countries -- unless something happening in another country impacts the U.S., or U.S. citizens, or is a natural disaster like a tsunami or an earthquake, network news does not report on it -- we don't know that the scare ads we are seeing all over the television simply do not represent the experience or attitudes of most of the people living under these systems.

And then there are those people yelling, you're going to have this public option plan at the expense of my Medicare! Excuse me, are they not aware that Medicare is a "public option" government-run plan, exactly the kind of thing they're objecting to? Where do people leave their brains when they leave home?

There are legitimate things one can base objection to the bills on, perhaps how-do-we-pay for-this being one. The simple, and logical, answer to that would be: we raise taxes. All the countries with excellent health care systems have higher taxes to pay for them. They have accepted the idea of the shared burden of higher taxes, in order to have the shared benefit of good, reliable health care that does not force anybody to declare bankruptcy, because of their med-ical bills, or to go without medical care, because they can't afford it.

But Congress is scared to death to come out and say, 'we'll have to raise taxes, but it will be worth it.' I think it's a mistake for President Obama to insist that only the very rich should be taxed. Those guys should perhaps bear the lion's share of the burden, but it should, again, be a shared burden. My taxes help pay for improved roads, and I get to use those improved roads. My taxes should help pay for an improved health care system for everyone...including me.