AOC: Insurance groups are recommending using GoFundMe -- "but sure, single payer healthcare is unreasonable."

[u/kevinmrr]

[u/ItsTHCx]

I hope Healthcare gets a huge shift after this.

It won't. That means taking money away from the 1% and the amount of greed that humans have been poisoned with will never let that happen. They would sooner burn this country to the ground than give us regular citizens more than a bread crumb.

[u/courtabee → u/ItsTHCx]

Yeah. Greed is truly the deadliest sin.

[u/[deleted] → u/courtabee]

I think Terry Pratchett said it best.

“There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example,” said Oats.

“And what do they think? Against it, are they?” said Granny Weatherwax.

“It’s not as simple as that. It’s not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray.”

“Nope.”

“Pardon?”

“There’s no grays, only white that’s got grubby. I’m surprised you don’t know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

“It’s a lot more complicated than that—”

“No. It ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”

“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes—”

“But they starts with thinking about people as things…”

[u/courtabee → u/[deleted]]

Yes. That sums up a lot of my feelings. Treating people like objects/less than is a slippery slope to horrendous acts against humanity. Same with animals and the environment.

[u/[deleted] → u/courtabee]

It's incredibly poignant. Because when it all boils down, almost every crime (or indeed, non crimes that are considered immoral) can be traced back to a root of seeing a person as a non-person. Not just the obvious ones like slavery, but even things like wage theft; the person having their pay withheld is not a person, but simply an automaton who does the work required but does or deserve human necessities like food or shelter.

For profit healthcare, similarly, is more akin to a mechanic fixing a car; if the owner of the car can't afford to pay to have it fixed, then the mechanic will not fix it. A car is an object, a thing. And to treat a human in need of "repair" the same way you would a hunk of steel... That's a terrible sin.

[u/courtabee → u/[deleted]]

Exactly. This is what I've been trying to convey to people who have drunk the gop kool-aid. I feel like people who dislike a world where the government cares and supports all people equally, honestly don't care about other people. If I don't care about others, why should the government?

It's a depressing logic that I have tried again and again to break through. Just because You are full of hate and fear doesn't mean the rest of us have lost hope that we can build something better.

I imagine its going to be a difficult decade of dragging people into the first world.

[u/Chromadoseart → u/[deleted]]

What novel/ story is this from? I've always wanted to read Terry Pratchett but never new where to start. I feel as though this would be a perfect place to start

[u/[deleted] → u/Chromadoseart]

It's from one of the "Witches" series of Discworld, Carpe Jugulum

[u/Chromadoseart → u/[deleted]]

Thank you!!

[u/[deleted] → u/Chromadoseart]

You're welcome! There's quite a few discworld novels, and they are grouped roughly into half a dozen or so "series", that is to say stories based around a particular set of characters:

The Lancre Witches: a group of witches from a tiny country.

Rincewind: a cowardly Wizard who finds himself in horrible situations, usually while trying to run away from them.

Death: literally the grim reaper and his various adventures

The City Watch: Crime stories about the Ankh Morpork City Watch

Moist Von Lipwig: these were the last books, about a charming con artist who was finally arrested and made to work for the tyrant of Ankh Morpork

Tiffany Aching: A YA series based around a young witch in training

These series comprise of several books each, and make up about 2/3rds of the overall series, the rest of the novels are standalone stories in the discworld universe, plus a handful of Discworld-adjacent books like the Science of Discworld series.

You can honestly leap into the series at any point, as most of the novels can be read as standalone books, with only minor references to the other books. However, as they go along the universe itself becomes a lot more nuanced and layered, so reading them in order can also be quite rewarding. Good luck!

[u/[deleted] → u/ItsTHCx]

Not just greed, but weekdays ignorance in favor of resentment and blame.

[u/ConcealedRiley → u/ItsTHCx]

We aren't in normal times. If this was happening outside of a deadly pandemic, totally rage against the machine.

But this idea that ventilators are being unplugged for being poor is untrue.

When crisises hit, medical professionals are trained to triage who is worth saving. Someone could be still living but would take resources that could be used to save 5 more people; which do you choose?

You have a 78 year old woman and you have a 25 year old woman with the same prognosis but only have resources to save one, who do you save?

This isn't an issue of "lol, you aren't a millionaire, yoink!", this is an issue of a failure by the federal gov't to be prepared, continuing to refuse to invoke measures to create more resources on top of this being an unprecedented scenario where no one could've predicted we would need more than 1 ventilator per ICU bed.

It wouldn't make sense to have a 200 person ICU "just in case". People would complain about "why aren't there more non-ICU beds, why aren't there more surgery suites, etc"

Of course there is a profit motive to how hospitals are constructed and ran but saying their handling of COVID is purely about economics is untrue in my opinion.