Blind Rage

A lot of angry Americans are heading to the polls this November. Problem is, a lot of what their anger is based upon is utterly false. Below are some of the things voters believe – and are mad as hell over, that aren’t actually true. Because The Contrarian hates the political smear emails that fill our inboxes masquerading as fact, I have footnoted this post using a wide variety of respected sources.

Claim #1: Taxes are out of control. Truth is, taxes are lower now than they’ve been in decades. In 2009 nearly half of all Americans owed no federal income tax(a). In 2008, 36% of Hoosiers paid no federal income taxes(b). In fact, federal taxes collected this year will represent the smallest portion of our overall economy since 1950. Only four developed nations collect less from their taxpayers than the U.S. They are Japan, Turkey, Mexico, and South Korea(c). And amazingly, according to a recent CBS/NY Times Poll, only 12% of Americans are aware that last year’s stimulus bill actually lowered taxes for 95% of Americans. 24% of respondents believed their taxes went up, while 53% thought they’d stayed the same.

Claim #2: I’m Mad As Hell About Health Care Reform. Let’s take these one at a time.

-“It’s a complete takeover of our healthcare system.” Not true. That would be a British or Canadian-style system, something that was never seriously considered in Congress. The government will not show up to nationalize your doctor’s office, hospital or pharmacy(a).

-Maybe you got the email titled, “Another Obama Nightmare,” claiming the reform bill included a 3% tax on all real estate transactions. No true(b).

-“Health Care Reform will raise my taxes this year.” Again, not true(c).

-“Health Care Reform will create panels to decide how much care patients get.” Not true(d). We can credit Sarah Palin in part for this mistaken belief thanks to her famous claim the bill would create “Death Panels,” which would decide who lives and dies. I received another mass email claiming that senior citizens would be forced to get euthanasia counseling every 5 years, presumably to encourage them not to request aggressive medical procedures, thereby saving the government a lot of money. Also not true (e).

-“Why should I have to pay for health care for people too lazy to get it themselves?” I received a number of anti-health reform emails painting unflattering pictures of the stereotypical “Welfare Queens” wanting free health care. So, let’s start by dispelling some myths about poverty. The majority of welfare recipients are white and either suburban or rural, not black and inner-city(f), and the average family living below the poverty line has at least one adult working full time(g). And in 2009, 60% of the 1.5 million bankruptcy’s filed in the U.S. were caused by medical bills. The majority of those filers were educated, middle class homeowners and 75% of them HAD! health insurance but reached policy payout limits(h).

Claim #3: The Federal Government Won’t Do Anything To Control Illegal Immigration. I spoke with a Tea Party activist this summer who insisted Obama and the Democrats were refusing to do anything to control illegal immigration and that crime was out of control in Arizona border towns. This echoes the sort of thing you might hear on Fox News (a). Truth is, crime in Southwestern border counties has dropped more than 30% in the past 20 years and F.B.I. statistics show the safest 4 cities in the U.S. – San Diego, El Paso, Phoenix and Austin are all in border states (b). And while the number of those trying to cross our southern border has dramatically declined due to the weak economy, the U.S. broke its record last year for the most deportations of illegals: 392,000(c), well up over G. W. Bush’s last year in office. The Department of Homeland Security also has begun auditing employers suspected of knowingly hiring Illegals,(approximately 3,200 employers) and as a result imposed more than $50 million in fines. There are also more border patrol agents currently working on the border than at any time in U.S. history (d). And the President recently sent 532 National Guard Troops to the border to help out.

I could go on, present the truth about the bailouts (polls show most Americans believe the bank bail outs happened under Obama, though they actually happened under G. W. Bush and the previous Congress(a)) the deficit, gun control, but you get the point. We’ve got a country filled with angry voters who don’t know very much about what they’re angry about.

Why do so many people believe so many things that are just plain false? I figure there are a number of reasons – and no footnotes here, this is just my opinion.

First, the quality of TV news in this nation has truly suffered as networks focus more on quarterly profits and less on meaningful reporting. And petty conflict sells. If you’re outraged about something and show up at your congressman’s town hall meeting and scream at him, the camera will be in place to follow every moment. Stand up at the same meeting and politely share thoughtful concerns, and it will not appear on the 6:00 o’clock news. Calm debate is just not interesting.

Secondly, there is a cottage industry that creates politically-charged emails that are filled with – well, there’s no other word for it; lies. This is something forces on the right have become very fond of. I say on the right because at least twice a week I get an email that attacks President Obama or the Democrats in Congress and 9 times out of 10 they turn out to be absolute lies. During the 8 years President Bush was in office, I got exactly 2 emails attacking him, and those were obvious jokes, not intended to trick anyone with a false claim.

Considering that every one of those smear campaign emails ends with a comment like, “Send this to all the people you know who are true patriots.” I’ll do the same thing to my readers for the first time.

If you know someone who loves America and wants it to be a better place but is so blind with rage they can’t tell the truth from political propaganda, please forward this to them.

Taxes 1: (a) Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research organization. (c) The Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research organization. (c) Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development.

Health Care 2: (a) CBS News Healthwatch (b) 3% Real Estate Tax: http://www.snopes.com/politics/taxes/realestate.asp (c) Fox News, The Associated Press. (d) Associated Press. (e) http://www.snopes.com/politics/medical/euthanasia.asp (f) U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1355/is_n21_v90/ai_18744024/?tag=rbxcra.2.a.33, (g) Bureau of Labor Statistics, (h) CNN Health: http://articles.cnn.com/2009-06-05/health/bankruptcy.medical.bills_1_medical-bills-bankruptcies-health-insurance?_s=PM:HEALTH

Immigration 3: (a) http://mediamatters.org/research/201010130005 (b) FBI Statistics , The New Yorker. (c) Department of Homeland Security, KETKnbc.com. (d) The Arizona Republic

Bank Bailouts: (a) http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1766512.ece

Health Care for "Poor People"

Woven among the various reasonable arguments against health care reform was the complaint, “Why should I have to pay for health care for people too lazy to get it themselves?”

This, “blame the poor” argument is so cruel and ignorant it nearly takes your breath away. It’s just another example of how a personal bias can sound like the obvious answer - facts be damned.

The health care horror stories I’ve personally encountered in recent years have nothing whatsoever to do with poor or lazy people.

Last year I wrote about my friend, I’ll call her Cindy, who gave up her health care policy when she could no longer afford it. Cindy is a private business owner. She works at least 10 hours a day and often longer, at least 6 days a week. Each year as her health insurer raised rates (though she was healthy and never made claims), she increased her deductible to keep it affordable. Eventually her deductible reached a whopping $10,000. So she didn’t show up in the statistics showing tens of millions in the U.S. without health insurance; that is until she eventually couldn’t afford even that either.

Not long after I wrote about Cindy I got a mass email from a Noblesville health care reform opponent. It was authored by a doctor who described a derogatory stereotype of an African American, inner city “welfare queen,” and then asked, “And our Congress expects me to pay for this woman's health care?”

It would be so simple if that’s what health care reform was all about – a distant, threatening, lazy minority. But it isn’t. The Doctor apparently isn’t aware that the average family living below the poverty line in America has at least one adult working full time.

Another Noblesville couple I know, I’ll call John and Sherry, also work long hours as private business owners. When Sherry needed radical dental surgery they didn’t even consider getting care in the U.S. They have dental insurance, but it came with a annual cap that wouldn’t begin to cover the cost of the multiple surgeries Sherry needed. So John and Sherry made two trips to Costa Rica and three trips to Mexico where Sherry was treated in first class facilities by American-trained doctors for less than a 3rd the cost of care in the U.S. (including the cost of travel). That they felt they couldn’t afford care right here in Indiana is nothing less than depressing. That they found it so inexpensive in a nearby and otherwise backward country is demoralizing.

Yet, in the Let It Out sidebar of the Indianapolis Star, over the past year I’ve read comment after comment moaning, “How can Obama make me buy health care for lazy people?”

That's an oversimplification on steroids?

Cindy and John and Sherry aren’t lazy or poor people and their problems with our health care system have nothing to do with how hard they work. The problem is a marketable product (health care) that doesn’t operate very well in a free enterprise system. That’s what my friend and client, Ben encountered.

Ben is also a private Noblesville business owner who found himself doubting he should purchase a home because of our dysfunctional health care system. A few weeks before closing on a modest Noblesville home he found he needed a heart stint procedure. In the years previous, he’d been paying an ever-increasing rate for health insurance. As a result of the procedure, he feared his insurer would raise his rates even more. The procedure went well and he got good care here in Noblesville, but he now knew he couldn’t shop for a new policy because he had a pre-existing condition. With so much financial uncertainty, should he buy a house?

He decided to go ahead with the purchase the same day President Obama signed the new health care bill into law.

As Ben and I stood outside the house chatting about his dilemma, he told me about a friend of his in a depressing, dead-end job. The friend is bright and hardworking and wants to quit his job and start his own business, but doesn’t because he’s afraid of leaving his family without the insurance his dead-end job provides.

So much economic activity has been strangled by our screwed-up health care system. And most of the problems have nothing to do with “lazy poor people.”

Remember just a few years ago when bankruptcy laws were reformed making it harder to file? TV and radio talking heads and politicians attacked bankruptcy filers as people living beyond their means, racking up debt they knew they could never pay back, “people who think the world owes them the good life.”

But a recent study conducted by Harvard University found that in reality 62% of all personal bankruptcies in America are caused by medical bills. And here’s the killer - 78% of those people who filed for bankruptcy because of medical bills had health insurance when their illness began.

This doesn’t happen in countries with a national health care system. And these aren’t just numbers, they represent thousands of destroyed lives and devastated families every year.

But still last week I saw someone post on Facebook, “I think the government should just stay out of health care and not take money from me to pay for lazy poor peoples health care.”

Complete and utter ignorance. And with so much blatant evidence to the contrary, it’s willful ignorance.