Deplorables or Victims of Lies?

Summary

A veteran named Joe, who has served his country and works a low-income job, struggles with understanding the complexities of healthcare policy and is influenced by misinformation, which affects his political views.

Abstract

The article discusses a conversation with Joe, a veteran and Amazon security guard with a modest income, who is skeptical of socialized medicine and believes in the superiority of private healthcare despite his own struggles with the VA system. The author explains to Joe that the VA's inefficiencies are due to underfunding rather than the nature of socialized medicine. The author also challenges Joe's beliefs by illustrating how capitalist healthcare values profit over patient well-being and by debunking the myth that Medicare for All would significantly raise taxes for those in lower income brackets. The article emphasizes that Joe, like many others, has been misled by political rhetoric regarding illegal immigration and social welfare abuse, and that the real issue contributing to economic inequality is the siphoning of wealth to capital owners since the 1970s. The author calls for a compassionate approach to informing people like Joe about the truth behind healthcare policies and economic disparities, advocating for unity and understanding rather than division.

Opinions

Joe, a veteran, distrusts socialized medicine and believes private healthcare is superior, despite his own negative experiences with the VA.
The author argues that the VA's long wait times are a result of chronic underfunding by the government, not an inherent flaw of socialized medicine.
The author presents a capitalist perspective on healthcare, suggesting that individuals are only valued for their economic productivity, and once that value is exceeded by healthcare costs, they are deemed expendable.
Joe is under the impression that Medicare for All would raise his taxes by 15%, which he cannot afford, and he blames illegal immigrants for abusing social welfare systems.
The author corrects Joe's misconceptions by providing evidence that there would be no tax increase for his income bracket under Medicare for All and that the highest personal income tax increase is 4%.
The article highlights the

Deplorables or Victims of Lies?

I talked to a vet named Joe [names changed to protect his privacy] two days ago. His father was also a vet. None in his family has a college education. He will be the first in his immediate family to have a degree when he graduates from our local community college. He voted GOP his whole life and so have all his family members. He was injured during his tour and relies on the VA for healthcare. He works for Amazon as a warehouse security guard making $29K/year. He has 3 kids.

He hates socialized medicine. He thinks he will have to pay more in taxes for Medicare for all and it will be just as bad or worse than the VA healthcare he has now. He says he has to wait 5 weeks for a simple appointment. His hope is to make enough money one day so he can afford private healthcare. He thinks America has the best private healthcare in the world and he wants it to stay so that he can have it one day.

Before jumping to thinking of Joe as a “deplorable”:

Or as a patriot:

I want to tell you what actually happened instead.

I explained to him that the reason he has to wait so long is not that VA is bad, but because they are under-capacity. It is under-capacity because it has been systematically and chronically under-funded. The government is the one who loves to talk about honoring our brave soldiers when sending them off to die but refuse to take care of them properly when they come home alive. And then they use the fact that VA has long wait times because of their deliberate under-funding to claim that socialized medicine means long wait times.

So I took the position of a capitalist and said to him, this is what capitalist healthcare will look like. How much economic value do you think you will produce in your lifetime? You can use the total amount of salary you expect to make as an approximation. He says $1–2 million. So, as a capitalist, I will say to you, as long as your healthcare need is below that number, I will give you healthcare because the country makes a profit by doing so. But the moment you exceed that amount, I will say you are better off dead. He was indignant. That’s horrible right? Do you know the private healthcare position is that you don’t deserve even that? If you have a life-threatening illness now that needs $2,000 to cure, but you don’t have $2,000 and have no insurance, they think you should die, or go bankrupt if you have access to credit. Nevermind how much you could contribute in your life if you had gotten healthcare.

Wouldn’t you rather have Medicare for All?

No, he wouldn’t because he thinks his tax will go up by 15% under Medicare for All and he can’t afford that. He tells me he can save at best $45 per month. He has no savings. He truly can’t afford a 15% increase in tax. He thinks he is in this situation now because the country has let in too many illegal immigrants who abused social welfare and food stamps.

So I told him, first in his income bracket, there is no tax increase. In fact, the highest personal income tax increase is 4%, and anyone making less than about $250,000/year will see no tax increase at all. He could not quite believe me. We had to go online searching for documents to convince him. Then I showed him this fairly well-known graph from the Economic Policy Institute.

What it shows is that since about the mid-1970s, workers who have created the wealth received little to none of their productivity gains. All that additional wealth created since the mid-1970s went only to the owners of capital. That massive siphoning off to the top dwarfs all the real or imaginary social program abuses by illegal immigrants, I’m sure easily by a factor of 1,000 or more. If he wants to find the cause of such massive inequality and middle-class and working-class insecurity in America, that is the more logical place to look. He was a little pensive about this and said he will think hard about what I’ve said. We parted, respecting each other perhaps a little more than when we first started our conversation.

Joe is a hardworking guy. He is taking college classes while holding down a $10/hr job and providing for three kids. His wife works as well to make ends meet. He thinks he is doing all right and will do even better in the future. He believes in relying on his own hard work to provide for his family. He does not want handouts.

My heart goes out to him. This is the kind of people both the Republican and the Democratic parties are using and discarding. People like Joe are NOT voting against their self-interest because they are, as Hillary Clinton claimed, deplorable racist, sexist, etc., etc. And they are united behind Trump only because they still hope against hope that he will look out for them. He and others like him have given everything to their country but are living paycheck to paycheck. They are being lied to and they think medicare for all will hurt them. And they feel cheated when they believe the lie that illegal immigrants cheating the system are causing them not to be able to provide well for their family.

They are so busy trying to provide for their family and improve themselves, they don’t have the luxury as I do of searching for and reading long documents online in order to discern the truth from the lies our politicians, their billionaire puppet masters, and their mass media surrogates relentlessly tell us. So they trust who their parents and friends trust. Our politicians from both parties and mass media both left and right, have lied to them, manipulated them, and abused their trust. But once they know the facts, they will start thinking and changing their minds. The Republican Party co-opted the Tea Party Movement. Obama crushed the Occupy Movement. Both parties are now refusing to deal with the impending climate collapse. They cannot fool all the voters with their shell game all the time.

So many of Trump’s base are people like him. We have got to talk to them and tell them the truth, with love, not condescension.

The majority of Americans make way less than $250,000. We are being divided by both the political parties to hate each other over lies. Only when enough of us realize this and stop hating and fighting each other will we truly have freedom, democracy, and a level playing field.