Joshua Pittman of Montgomery, Alabama is now signed up for some nice, juicy ObamaCare. He’s 31, self-employed, and a self-described libertarian who voted for Ron Paul in 2012.
Though he initially supported repealing the law, Pittman became curious about Obamacare in the days and weeks before it launched. For years, he had gone uninsured, thinking he’d be able to “get over anything with a bandaid and a six pack of beer.” But a lead poisoning incident earlier this year shook his confidence and bank account, lea[v]ing him with tens of thousands of dollars in medical bills. “I was a healthy person and it really depleted me financially, so it made me look at things in a different way than I would before. I understood the importance of people being insured.”
Not to be critical of Mr. Pittman, but it seems to be a common feature among conservative people that they need to experience certain things in a very personal way before they can really understand the merits of progressive efforts to improve people’s lives. In Mr. Pittman’s case, going uninsured bit him in the ass and cost him tens of thousands of dollars. He also came down, it appears, with something that has been traditionally considered a pre-existing condition.
Asked what he liked about Obamacare, Pittman highlighted its prohibition against denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions, noting that he wouldn’t be able to find coverage without it, and said that the policies offered in the marketplace seemed more affordable and comprehensive than those available to him on the individual market. “You may pay $18 a month [for a cheaper plan] and you’re missing level of coverage. It’s not as easy as you’re going to pay this much a month,” he says.
Finally, he has the self-awareness to understand that being a free rider on the health care system is not a socially responsible thing to do and that accepting a subsidy for health care doesn’t make it a free ride.
“I’ve seen first hand people hitting up the emergency room for free health care and then putting a burden on [everyone else] and that’s not something I would want to do, I want to take personal responsibility … By no means am I trying to take a government handout…it’s not a free handout, you’re paying for this health care, but it’s making it more accessible to more people.”
Now that Mr. Pittman has had this series of revelations, I wonder what he thinks about Ron Paul’s answer to Wolf Blitzer’s question about whether we should let a 30 year old man who chooses to go without medical insurance die rather than give him the urgent care he needs.
I also wonder what Mr. Pittman thinks about the fact that Ron Paul supporters cheered the idea of letting that hypothetical man die. After all, he was 30 years old and choosing to go without medical insurance last year. He came down with a serious medical condition. What if he hadn’t been able to incur tens of thousands of dollars of bills? And how can those folks insist so strongly that people take personal responsibility for getting health insurance and then turn around and call the personal mandate some form of tyranny?
When confronted with reality, don’t you think that Mr. Pittman would find the arguments of Ron Paul and his supporters to be callous, inconsistent, and even illogical?
Maybe this hasn’t fully sunken in, yet, and maybe it never will. But there’s a decent chance that Mr. Pittman will be less inclined to buy the easy, pat answers provided by libertarians in the future. If he doesn’t already know better, he should.
The fundamental defect in people like this is that they’re completely lacking in empathy- basically, they’re sociopaths. That’s why they simply cannot grok any kind of hardship until and unless it affects them personally.
Well, I agree to an extent. I think we might want to hold off on calling Mr. Pittman a sociopath, but he definitely has an underdeveloped knack for empathy. And that is definitely a component of sociopathy.
Empathy is reserved for those you feel are like you. Almost anyone who has ever rooted for a character has empathy. It’s just that the conservative circle of “people who are like me” is restricted to white, heterosexual, “Christian” Republicans. And their dogs. Liberals actually feel that they have lots in common with all types of others, so they have empathy for a far greater number of people from a far greater variety of circumstances.
Also, too: good literature makes you empathic. http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/i-know-how-youre-feeling-i-read-chekhov/?hpw
In my view, anything that creates a circumstance where people are forced to come face to face with a situation which more personalizes human suffering and hardship is a good thing. Because once a person who has lived in a largely empathy free bubble is forced to do that, it makes it that much easier to build off that experience the next time it happens.
As time goes by, it is possible that they will be less likely to so easily compartmentalize people into groups viewed as “others”. Empathy has to be learned. And what better learning device is there than personal experience? I look back at the evolution of my own personal views, and it is quite apparent that I look at things quite differently than I did 30 years ago. And I attribute most of that to things I have experienced and the people I have come to know.
This.
The possibility of change doesn’t mean the guarantee of change. But why have politics if the possibility doesn’t exist.
“It is not enough to understand, or to see clearly. The future will be shaped in the arena of human activity, by those willing to commit their minds and their bodies to the task.”
—Robert Kennedy—
This is pretty much how I see it. It’s natural to restrict your good will toward your in-group to a degree, but lefties see their in-group more as “the human race” than just “my friends.”
I know I would feel less charitable to say, space aliens, than other humans at least at first.
No. Empathy is a universal human capacity. It’s their cultural conditioning. This is particularly true when empathy is an abstract thing concerning people very remote from them.
an approriate time to read my sig line.
There’s no way this becomes a major electoral advantage for Democrats in the long term. As long as people like Mr. Pittman even pay a nickel for their health care, they will claim that “I paid for it, dammit!” See also: Social Security, which doesn’t make old people liberal. No one knows how much they paid in, but they all know they are entitled to receive whatever it is they receive. Plus, once they hear that there is a black person somewhere who got a larger subsidy than he deserved, they will all forget their own subsidy.
The conservative mind is immune to any reasoning that is not aimed towards justifying themselves, justifying authoritarianism, or hating outsiders.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: the only thing conservatives understand is a beat-down (rhetorically). They need to be told over and over that they believed a bunch of lies, and that they are suckers for continuing to believe the liars. They need to be reminded that they slandered those who told them the truth. They need to be mocked for their shrieking anger. Only when their cult membership has been broken will they be able to accept the larger, fact-based world.
Agreed, the hard-core wingnuts will never be won over. But a significant number of people currently in the not-paying-attention mushy middle will.
With respect, the Democrats’ support among the elderly population would be close to non-existent without Social Security and Medicare. The elderly are more socially conservative because the whole country was more socially conservative when they were growing up. As a group, they are more affluent because they’ve had a lifetime to build up their assets and savings. As people age, they tend to become less welcoming of change. Providing for their retirement security is the main attraction of the Democratic Party to the elderly and attacks on their retirement security are the main points of disagreement with the GOP.
Likewise, with ObamaCare and white working class socially conservative people. ObamaCare won’t make them a Democratic constituency, but it will make them a less monolithic opponent.
Well, you may be right, but I think that Democratic support among the elderly was highest when the New Deal was new, and again when Medicare was new, and has faded to equilibrium at this point. I’m pretty sure that in the 60s and 70s older people were much more Democratic. But once it was clear that the GOP plan to dismantle either of these programs wouldn’t work, they felt free to vote for Reagan.
Of course, we just have to keep the Democrats ahead until 2010 before the demographics finally push the hard right into obscurity. So I encourage the Republicans to keep trying to take away people’s Obamacare.
2010? wasn’t that 3 years ago? not sure where you’re getting your “facts” but in both 2008 and 2012 I saw a large number of elderly white ppl working for Obama.
Sorry, I meant 2020.
As for facts, I wonder why you think what you saw works as a significant piece of data, or how it shows whether or not the proportion of seniors voting Democratic has changed since, say, 1970.
65 and older went for Romney 56-44. Seniors have been voting for Republicans over Dems since 2000 I think.
Yes, and a reminder: white working-class voters outside the South voted (narrowly) for President Obama in 2012.
This can’t be repeated often enough. It continues to be ignored in the litany of plaints about supposedly cratering Dem support in the “white working class”.
“Not to be critical of Mr. Pittman…”
Seems to me this guy spent a lot of money to learn his lesson. That makes progressives better financial managers than the typical free marketer.
I see this kind of cognitive disconnect with members of the military as well, in particular, retired members of the military now collecting government provided military pensions. It makes no sense whatsoever.
I have many high school chums that fall into this category, who are quite conservative but fail to grasp the idea that perhaps the Department of Defense is part of “The Government” they are so quick to bash. Some of them are married to teachers, no less.
What’s it going to take to get some self reflection going on here?
well, if you want evidence the left is better at financial mgmt than the right, see: President Clinton and President Obama vs President Reagan and President Bushes…
Right on the money. GOP & Libertariaan ilk preach freedom and personal responsibility not as deeply held philosophies but simply as situational cudgel to bash those they hate. Goes to show you precisely why it is that GOP want Obamacare gone.
Healthcare is the most intimate aspect of people’s lives, the only thing (unlike taxes) no one can live vicariously through another person for. So there is no room to live in an alternate reality. Either you have healthcare you don’t. Obamacare offers that cold-eyed REALITY CHECK to everyone. That’s what GOP are afraid of. Can’t bullshit anyone when REAL affordable relief is staring at them on a computer screen. Can’t hoodwink them on THIS matter anymore.
And then as humans are wont to do, they are gonna start wondering about what ELSE they’ve been lied to on…then the tight grip GOP had on the base starts to pouf!
That’s what they’re afraid of
The whole personal responsibility thing is such a great argument, yet when i brought it up here yesterday I got plenty of pushback.
We can argue in favor of social responsibility and personal responsibility at the same time.
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country (I’ll revise that – we should ask both). We should see ourselves as partners in our own society, both contributing and receiving.
glad you brought it up yesterday. a good point imo. actually didn’t understand why you got all that criticism
The reason is right there in his words: “I’m not trying to take a government handout.” It’s the continuing stigmatization that being on the government dole is something you should be ashamed of. He felt he had to rationalize something he’s taking advantage of by saying, “Look, I’m not like those moochers on food stamps and welfare, I’m paying for it.”
Indeed, it’s not a handout. I look at it in economic terms:
There is a lot of demand that is not being supplied by the “free” market, and the federal government is stepping in to facilitate supplying that demand. For the average citizen, Obamacare is giving him nothing more than an opportunity to buy affordable health insurance.
It’s what happens when you’ve got a middleman who is not motivated to squeeze every last dime out of its customers, but is motivated to serve everyone. Conversely, replacing the service motive with the profit motive is an underexamined cost of privatizing public services.
This guy seems to be persuaded by the “personal responsibility” argument that Repubs used when trotting out this Heritage approach in the early 90s. And that he is personally paying in, so it’s not a “moocher handout”, which is of course completely accurate. Some in the earlier thread decried attempts to use this rhetoric to persuade rightists, but I’m not so sure it wouldn’t have had some useful effect with the non-braindead.
The $100,000 Question is whether the Pittmans are reachable and whether they might start demanding that their future Repub reps (they won’t vote Dem) will stop hatin’ on Obamacare. Who knows. A lot will depend on whether these rightwingers who experience some cognitive dissonance start to seek out dissenting views from orthodox, approved “conservatism” since they aren’t going to get them from the Rushbo Noise Machine. If they stick with “news” that openly markets itself as “conservative” and remain basically apolitical, it’s hard to see how any changes in thought will result. Or perhaps Pittman will meet an AL lib’rul, some do exist.
As for the troubling recurrence of conserva-tarians et. al. not being able to understand massive social problems or injustice until they are hit themselves, this may be a personality trait. Reactionaries and Traditionalists seem low on intuition, being able to imagine things or concepts abstractly. Also, empathy is a thinking mechanism, a way of thought. Let’s just say that the endless and well developed “conservative” messaging of personal callousness as a virtue doesn’t exactly encourage one to develop the empathy habit! It also aids the Repub Do-Nothing agenda.
And of course, to reactionaries, there are no actual problems is the Greatest Country in the World! (TM). Only America-Hatin’ Libs keep talking about all our problems. As Boss Rushbo says every day, everything would be great if we could just go back to the Way Things Used to Be! Until the “fake” problem bits the dittohead in the ass. THEN there may be something to it, haha.
What’s next for Mr Pittman? Global warming “curiousity”? Another lib’rul non-problem…..
This guy is 31 years old. The only message he’s likely heard is that government is the problem not the solution. He’s never seen the Federal Government institute any program that reinforces the social safety net. It must be quite a shock to his system to discover that the government can do something for him.
Personally, I don’t care if it makes him a Democrat or not, I’m just glad he’s getting covered. I think the beauty of the program is that people like him can participate without feeling like he’s taking a hand-out.
And there’s a lesson there for neoliberals who would be happy to means-test everything in sight.
See also the Medicaid expansion, where some states making $5000 a year is too muh money to qualify for regular Medicaid. And more where people will make too much to get any subsidy of any worth.
No more means-testing. If we want rich and/or upper middle class to pay more, raise their taxes.
What complete and utter bullshyt.
Can’t stand this asshole.
HE is so special.
HE is so different from all ‘ those people’ in the ER.
Fuck him.
Everyone in the ER is fucking SICK and NEEDS HELP!!!
They are NOT looking for ‘ free healthcare’.
Fuck this asshole.
Yep, this is right up there with those anecdotal stories people like to tell of all those food stamp recipients bitching to the grocer when the store is out of lobster tails; because they’ve “just gotten tired of eating steak every night”.