Get The Granny! Or: This Is What I Came Back For?

You must have heard about the Death Book by now. If not, here's a nice discussion of it (shamelessly stolen from Atrios):





When we get communistimistic health care, some faceless bureaucrats will decide who shall die and who shall live. Horrifying! Not at all like the current system where the faceless market will decide who shall die and who shall live.

Frank Luntz, the Republican Mesmer, has given instructions on how to fight any change in health care, and those instructions boil down to: Make. Them. Scared.

What could be more scary than dying by someone killing you? That's why we hear this crap. Also because the wingnuts have nothing better than the discussion of living wills and the kind of stuff that we are all urged to think about in any case, such as when to resuscitate, whether to continue life as a vegetable (or a meatball?) and so on. And we do die in the end, my sweetings.

I'm not arguing that we should let nameless bureaucrats decide about death-and-life decisions (though the wingnuts do want to do exactly that with pregnant women, you know). I'm arguing that scaring us as if we were little children who fear monsters under the bed is what this is all about. No, a government-run health care system doesn't try to Get Granny. In fact, women live longer, on average, in those otherwise comparable countries which have such a system than they live here.