No Rational Discourse

Last night a neighbor came over with some work shirts he wanted Donna to embroider.  We asked him how things were going with his heating & air conditioning business.  He told us business was great.  With all the new green energy tax credits available to consumers, he’d been selling a lot of solar-powered water heaters.

But he talked about those tax credits as if they were a gift from heaven, not part of the Obama administration’s stimulus package, so I mentioned it to him.  This set off a tirade about how Obama is killing business.  It was such a disconnect I could only marvel.

But I kept trying.  Since we’re both vets I mentioned that Obama had increased funding for VA health care.  This prompted an even crazier assertion, one I’d not heard before: that Obama had proposed cutting off medical care to the nation’s military veterans, and thank God vets had stood up and forced him to back down.

I decided then and there that we had left rational discourse behind and went into mumble-polite-banalities mode.  He left a bit later.  At least he didn’t take his shirts with him, so Donna still stands to make a few bucks.

So.  Did Obama propose cutting off medical care to the nation’s veterans?  Er, not exactly . . . back in March, members of his staff proposed that the VA, which provides medical care to many veterans, try to recoup costs by billing veterans’ private insurers.  Some vets have private supplemental medical insurance; most don’t, so the proposal would have applied only to some vets, not all.  And it wouldn’t have affected a single vets’ medical care.

But whenever anyone tries to discuss changes, no matter how minor, to an established entitlement like government provided health care for veterans (which has been around since the end of the Civil War), the banshees begin to shriek.  Veterans’ groups protested loudly and the Obama administration backed down.

In fact, the military has always (well, at least since I’ve been in the service) had a policy of trying to recover expenses from members’ private insurance plans.

• When I shipped a car at government expense from Alaska to Virginia and it arrived damaged, the military told me to first file a claim with my own insurance carrier.  I did, and had to pay a $200 deductible.  I later submitted a claim for $200 to Uncle Sam, and Uncle paid me back.
• When retirees submit medical claims to the military HMO, TriCare, TriCare attempts to recoup those claims from retirees’ private insurance carriers.  Not all of us have private medical insurance, in which case TriCare pays for it all.  But if we do, TriCare forwards the claim to Blue Cross/Cigna/et al, then pays the difference to the doctors.

Frankly, what Obama’s staff proposed made good sense, and was fully in line with long-established military policy.  By forcing private medical insurance providers to do what they’re paid to do in the first place, the proposal would have saved taxpayer dollars, with zero effect on veterans’ health care.  None.  Nada.  Zip.  But the issue of veterans’ health care is red hot.  Obama touched it, got burned, and dropped it.

I know, I know, there are certain things politicians just can’t touch.  Third rails, they call them: social security, the real reason we’re sacrificing lives and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan (can you spell O-I-L?), Medicare, the necessity of increasing taxes, cutting the defense budget, and so on.  Third rails are a fact of political life.

But here’s what bothers me.  People are going around saying, with complete certainty, that Obama tried to abandon the nations’ veterans by cutting off their medical care, which is almost the exact opposite of what he actually proposed.  Another baldfaced lie has become part of the national discourse.

I don’t care how crazy you are, a president proposing to cut off veterans’ health care doesn’t pass the smell test.  What politician in his right mind would ever propose doing anything like that?  You might as well accuse Obama of being a secret Muslim, of being born in Kenya, or of wanting to club this baby seal:

And yet that’s the kind of shit grown people are going around saying.  Who started this insane story?  Fox News?  Rush?  Glenn Beck?  Did someone put something in the water?  Is there no longer any hope of rational discourse in this country?  What do we have to do to regain civic sanity?  Is there anything we can do?

Give me time . . . I’m thinking.  Cute seal, eh?