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Pschearer, when I hear conservatives on Fox News and Republican Congressmen constantly repeating “socialized medicine,” it strikes me as anachronistic fear-mongering. And that’s what yesterday and today have captured.
The reason it’s fear-mongering: we’ve got plenty of socialism already. Some of it’s efficient, some of it isn’t. Medicare is socialist. Medicare is incredibly efficient. It wastes some money but it’s a lot less than what the private system wastes. The military is also socialist. The military is incredibly INefficient and incredibly wasteful, even John McCain believes that. But being “socialist” isn’t the problem, being wasteful is the problem.
The reason Medicare is efficient and the military isn’t is because it’s socially acceptable to reign in Medicare practices, but most of us want the government to give the military whatever the military says it needs. When our leaders go after waste in Medicare, people consider them to be responsible pragmatists. But when our leaders go after waste in the Pentagon, their opponents attack them as being unpatriotic and anti-military.
Calling it “socialized medicine” is fear-mongering meant to scare people into opposing something that may or may not work efficiently, because it skates over the efficiency debate in favor of focusing on ideology.
And I think the point of the cartoon is that not only is it fear-mongering, but it isn’t as effective a tactic as it was a generation or so ago. I think it’s saying red-scare warnings of “socialism” won’t stir up a reflexive revulsion among today’s younger voters who grew up after the Cold War ended. Especially since “socialized medicine” DOES work in pretty much every other Western country (many of which have higher life expectancies than we do). I’ve heard a handful of horror stories about people in Canada who’ve been on waiting lists (always said as if that doesn’t happen here too), but if you ask pretty much any Canadian if they’d rather have our system, the answer would probably be “hell no.”
The thing about Archie, he was often right when he described what was happening in the country, but he was always wrong to be so fearful about it. He was always letting ideology get in the way.