Not only is she convinced that government bureaucrats are going to come to her house on a regular basis and try to pressure her to sign away her rights to full healthcare on her deathbed, but she insists that she read this in the bill. I assured her repeatedly that she couldn't have read that, as there wasn't anything like that in the bill, but she insisted it's there and that I had insulted her intelligence by suggesting otherwise.
And without a doubt, she repeated the exact phrases that all the anti-Obama nuts are repeating. This is being "rammed down our throats." How are we going to pay for fifty million new patients? Government bureaucrats shouldn't interfere with our healthcare. The shouting people at townhalls deserve better answers than the only ones they can possibly receive. The AARP is an insurance organization that makes more money when government gets involved, and doesn't care if their members die. And of course, she's read the bill, which she insists is extremely confusing and nebulous, yet which she knows contains all these nasty provisions which will intrude in her healthcare and kill her off early.
And sure, I had good responses to all of this, but she refused to even listen to any of it. And as the big irony, my dad was a career military guy and she's now in Medicare, which means she's had government healthcare for most of her life. And when I was pointing out that people really like Medicare and that Republicans oppose Medicare, she refused to even believe that. At best, she insisted that Republicans were only interested in cutting waste out of Medicare, and that Dems wanted to destroy it. Shortly after that, she insisted that she had to go and gave an unusually curt goodbye before hanging up.
And what's sad is that I thought she was better than this. Sure, she's been politically insane in the past. But after last year's elections, she swore off political news. She insisted that she wasn't watching Fox News or listening to Rush anymore, and I believed her, as I never saw her watching it during my visits earlier this year. Even last month while visiting, I was able to have reasonable discussions on this and even laughed at many of the ideas coming from rightwing nuts. And I specifically talked about the end-of-life stuff and how insane it is for anyone to imagine that this is somehow a bad thing.
But it's like the Pod People came and replaced my mom with a robotic replica. And while before, she was scoffing when I was telling her how nutty Obama's critics were (she couldn't believe that anyone could be as crazy as I was describing them), now she's repeating all their claims and insisting that I can't possibly be right when I correct her. After all, she's read the bill.
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4 comments:
LOL BB, at least she doesn't watch CBN (Christian Broadcasting Network) like mine.
ms.mudd
Doctor,
You ARE insulting her intelligence by suggesting otherwise.
An insult that she has more than earned. Sorry to be so blunt, but she shows every sign of significant mental incapacity there.
Green Eagle, I've got to disagree here. My mom's not dumb. Just...ill-informed. The problem isn't with her mental capacity, per se, but in trusting her sources of information.
As with most of these people, I suspect she assumes that there must be SOMETHING to the claims, as nobody would just invent this sort of thing. Yet, mere common sense should tell her that these claims can't POSSIBLY be true, as they're simply unbelievable.
And of course, the problem is that she hasn't read the bill, doesn't have time to read the bill, and doesn't care to do the required research which would expose her sources as being wrong. And while that can arguably be described as "dumb," I'm just not willing to go there. After all, I haven't read the whole bill either and am relying upon my sources to let me know if any of this is true, so I'm really not in any better position to know the truth than she is. The main difference is that I picked better sources of info than she did. But of course, she'd say the same of me.
Sorry, doctor, I don't buy it. I mean, I'm not insulting your mother, who I obviously don't know,but intelligence implies a certain ability to distinguish truth from the most ludicrous lies, and people like this seem not to have that ability. Falling for this sort of thing demonstrates more, I think, than mere ignorance.
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