By The River

With the government plan, said Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, “you will have to call a bureaucrat and hope to God his calculator is more compassionate and smarter than your doctor.”
--New York Times, July 31, 2009

The moral bankruptcy of the corporations and politicians fighting against national healthcare for all is summed up in the above quote from Congressman Mike Rogers, a Republican who represents a district in the middle of Michigan that includes the state capital, Lansing, but also numerous small towns. The quote is a complete and utter lie, part of the scare tactics being used against national healthcare that are hammered home by rightwing television and radio commentators.

Do you know someone on Medicare, the "government-run healthcare" that serves people over 65 in this country, and serves them well? Ask them if they've ever once had to call a "government bureaucrat" for permission to be treated, or for anything else. Rogers, a former FBI agent and home builder, knows what he's saying is a lie. Either that or he's too deluded to master even the Washington, D.C., Metro system, let along serious legislation. One of Rogers' previous big issues was stopping the importation of Canadian garbage to landfills in the United States. He apparently sees a Canadian-style health plan in much the same light, even though vast majorities of Canadians have no problem with a system that remove financial worries from the picture and gives them longer life expectancies than Americans.

Coming from an economic basket case state with the nation's highest unemployment rate, he could help his constituents far more by ensuring the Obama healthcare plan passes than by shilling for the healthcare industry and the diehard ideologues of the Republican Party.

One reason national healthcare seems to be losing is that we no longer have a Fairness Doctrine to ensure that television and radio stations present balanced stories, or give people the right to reply on air with their own points of view. The law was in effect from 1949 to the mid-1980s, and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving a rightwing Christian radio station in Red Lion, Pennsylvania. Congress repealed the law during the Reagan era de-regulation of the middle 1980s.

It is no accident that the American Right began its rise at about the same time. Repeal of the Fairness Doctrine gave rise to Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Bill O'Reilley, who could not operate with quite the same unmitigated venom if the Fairness Doctrine was still in place. Nothing would stop them from reporting facts to their listeners, but there's the rub. The Fairness Doctrine, for better or worse, enforced an unsteady moderation in American political discourse, legally only for broadcast discourse but through a spillover effect to all political discourse. It made it harder for extreme political minorities to get airtime for their views, but they were not foreclosed in any way from print media.

Without the Fairness Doctrine, minority political factions backed by big corporate money can broadcast any old lie they want without fear of having a "response" run on the same station. In a perfect world, listeners to slanted broadcasts would take the time to research the issues and draw their own conclusions. But in fact, as the bad guys of world history discovered, if you tell people that they'll have to get the permission of a government bureaucrat to get treated for illness often enough, many will come to believe it.

Even if it is a lie.