Devastatingly brutal. When ideology stops humans from feeling. The other striking part of the Senator’s response is the logical dissonance. “Government is bad, but talk to my office and we’ll try to help you”.
Via: This article, “The GOP’s Health Solution” on Slate.
From a different Slate article with a fantastic headline:
“Republicans continue working to shorten and sadden the lives of the elderly in more oblique ways, too. One of President Obama’s first official acts was to reverse Bush’s executive order limiting government funding for stem-cell research, which remains the most promising avenue for new treatments of diseases that afflict the aged, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. Clean-air legislation, which the Republicans defeated in 2002, has the potential to save 23,000 lives per year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Many of those victims are elderly people, who suffer disproportionately from cardiovascular and respiratory illnesses exacerbated by air pollution. Because emissions of carbon monoxide and such are merely a contributing factor, you can’t name the individuals who have died because of this policy choice. But there are tens of thousands of people who would still be elderly today if Republicans didn’t value the rights and campaign contributions of polluters more highly than their lives.”
Since Social Security was instated, life expectancy has grown sharply. I don’t know if we can definitively see causality, but it’s an interesting argument.
From the same article:
“Faced with an unpalatable choice between cutting benefits and raising taxes to pay for the growing costs of entitlement programs, Republicans gravitated toward a third alternative—restraining growth in life expectancy. If you want lower taxes and aren’t willing to risk cutting spending, you need fewer beneficiaries.”
Read “The Republican Death Machine: Who’s really pulling the plug on Grandma?” by clicking here.
The GOP is heading towards irrelevance by not embracing reform. Something is going to give sooner or later and this conversation will have to be had. The question is if not now, when?