Conflation

People.

It's not "health care reform," however much the folks in Congress and the White House and in the media want us to believe it.

It's health insurance reform, and there's not really all that much reform involved.

Just as "global warming" was used by climate change deniers who pointed to extreme winters as a way to discredit calls for action, "health care reform" is being used to obscure the fact that these bills are not about providing health care, but about enabling - or mandating! - access to insurance. 

They are not the same thing, and it irritates me that they keep being conflated - deliberately, I suspect. 

In any case, this conflation is part of the larger system of problems that keep affordable, universally available health care out of our reach.  It tells us that not only is health insurance an essential part of the system, it is synonymous with medical care itself.  This is dangerous; let's not let this conflation go unchallenged.

Comments

[coozledad]

I have to confess my complete exasperation with a system stacked against even moderate reforms. I didn't go out and work for this party and have a bunch of ineducable white slugs shake their fists in my face so the Dems could turn around and ass crawl for corporate sponsorship. I can tell them right now, they're delusional. I've worked in corporateville long enough to know that its primary ideology is white male ascendancy, and the pivotal historical moment for them, their dochstosselgende, is the removal of Nixon from office. They will never forget it, and they're absolutely hell bent on running public institutions into the ground and making the country ungovernable.
The Balkanization of this country is inevitable. There are too many petit-Milosevics with an itch to shitcan the constitution.

[Rana]

I hate to say it, cooz, but part of me agrees with you - especially the bit about Balkanization. I'm coming to increasingly suspect that the future of this country is going to be a highly localized one, with smaller communities coming together to do what they can, while the larger nation goes to ruin. Democracy's always been a beast best suited for relatively small, fairly homogenous communities; trying to make it work across a continent has always been a slog.

[Solecism]

Yes! Bring back the city-states. Continent-wide democracy is illusory in so many ways. Of course, this transition is likely only with a great deal of social upheaval if not outright collapse, with associated devastating costs, so I can't necessarily advocate it as an intentional course of action...even if I think it is a worthwhile end goal.
-chris (in Madison)