July 31, 2012

More on lying: universal healthcare version

Check out this interesting post by a pro-life conservative who moved to Canada for a few years.  She was pregnant with her third child and scared to death that the socialists in Canada would harm her pregnancy.  She even considered trying to come back to the states for treatment where she could choose doctors and pay for all of it.

As it turns out, she found out that it wasn't bad.  It was actually good.
Fast forward a little past the Canadian births of my third and fourth babies. I had better prenatal care than I had ever had in the States. I came in regularly for appointments to check on my health and my babies’ health throughout my pregnancy, and I never had to worry about how much a test cost or how much the blood draw fee was. I didn't have to skip my ultrasound because of the expense.
And about abortion? She was horrified to see that their healthcare covered abortions, but then realized that it wasn't as bad as she thought.
Abortion wasn’t pushed as the only option by virtue of it being covered. It was just one of the options, same as it was in the USA. In fact, the percentage rates of abortion are far lower in Canada than they are in the USA, where abortion is often not covered by insurance and can be much harder to get. In 2008 Canada had an abortion rate of 15.2 per 1000 women (In other countries with government health care that number is even lower), and the USA had an abortion rate of 20.8 abortions per 1000 women.
Imagine that? Fewer abortions even though they were covered?  But as she notes, the lower number might be due to the fact that no women had to worry about paying for expensive care or losing their job. Talk about pro-life.

In this follow-up post, she talks about why she was so scared of universal care:
I was afraid of Universal Health Care, because I knew nothing else but what I had been told by religious propaganda and conservative think tanks. They repeatedly spread the idea that Universal Health Care took away all choice. I was told that people were assigned doctors, and were not free to choose a different doctor. I was told that older people were denied health care and left to die because they were not a priority to the national interest. I was also told that abortion was pushed heavily on any woman who had an unwanted pregnancy or women who were pregnant with a child with disabilities. I was told that people with disabilities would be eliminated by government encouraged abortions or possibly even killed at birth (they wouldn’t want those people on the federal dole since they would “waste money” and “drain the system.”)
She was lied to. And often by the same people who want the Ten Commandments on courthouse walls. Many of those liars undoubtedly did so out of ignorance, but that explains it only so far.

I am tired of liars lying for Jesus.

1 comment:

Noah said...

Imagine that? Fewer abortions even though they were covered? But as she notes, the lower number might be due to the fact that no women had to worry about paying for expensive care or losing their job. Talk about pro-life.

Amen! How does that point of view get more mainstream? That's a winner; that access to health care in general reduces abortions because you're no longer overwhelmed by the cost of providing health care for you and a baby (which, by the way, cost gobs and gobs of money). I think her conclusion there is spot-on.

And the list of lies...I hear them every day of every week and nobody has the stones to scream back.

Universal Health Care takes away choice. LIE

People are assigned doctors, and are not free to choose a different doctor. LIE

Older people are denied health care and left to die because they were not a priority to the national interest. LIE

Abortion is pushed heavily on any woman who had an unwanted pregnancy or women who were pregnant with a child with disabilities. LIE

People with disabilities would be eliminated by government encouraged abortions or possibly even killed at birth. LIE

Those last couple are really huge doozies too. Real whoppers. I am glad she saw through them finally, but for a while...she fucking bought it. She bought those lines. How in the name of whatever can anyone with a brain listen to someone say "the government will kill disabled kids cuz they are a financial drain" and think 'oh man, that sounds totally real and completely unlike a B-movie plot-line.'

And that it's pastors, priests, ministers - "people of the cloth" - perpetuating that crap...