Political Memes

I don't like where Nominal Dr Oz is usually coming from, but the bare transactional relationship isn't all that wrong.

We participate in many social contracts in our day-to-day life. We hold doors, we say please, we pay for things, we clean up our mess; these are part of what makes us not dirtbags, but it's a relationship that has rules; it's why that asshole listening to loud music or shouting into a phone held like a pizza slice (where are the reality-show cameras?!) inspire such offense.

In the larger society, we work to get money for basic needs. We pay taxes into a consolidated pool for the things that are bigger than our household. We elect people to manage our stuff for us, because we learned that we can't individually manage the commons without tragedy. Parks, clean water, reliable power, all of this needs to be provided and maintained for the public with public money managed by people chosen by the public who can do that best. When that fails, we get Trump.

Healthcare is like parks: we can't afford it individually, and our ultimate focus on the 'I' and the 'now' makes us bad managers. So we appoint people to manage the best healthcare system we can build, try to keep selfish conservatives from corrupting it for their own gain, and we fund it from taxes. Obviously, this is another part that Americans may not be aware of, and so I'm hoping they can just go with it for a sec.

And there the relationship is plain: healthcare wins when everyone's a healthy, productive, contributing member of society, naturally. When that happens, everyone also pays taxes as per a proper sliding scale (again, Americans will want to suspend disbelief and imagine that's happening while their own system isn't doing that effectively right now), and taxes fund, in part, more healthcare.

A healthy healthcare system exists directly to improve the health of all people in society, and indirectly funds its own existence.

While qualitative KPIs are hard to show concretely, more healthy, smart, working people pay more tax, and that's quantifiable. Pared down to a brutally simplistic relationship, it's good healthcare <-> more tax paid.

I support this. Sure, I want people to be healthier, just like I support schools I'll never attend just because I want people to be smarter. But this healthcare<->taxes thing is something I can sell to the selfish, transactional-thinking conservative dirtbags as a quantitative, invest-now-profit-later kind of thing I think speaks to most conservatives and the shrewd investment-porn they want to believe they're part of.

I'm proud to occupy a position where I pay far more in taxes than I'm currently using in services; and having been on the other end of it more than once, I'm very glad to be paying healthy taxes because that's a far better problem to have. I think we pay too little taxes above a certain earnings level - this region removed its scaled supplemental medical services payment and so it's supported only from tax proceeds - and I worry it's put our healthcare at risk of manipulation by populist shitheels trying to cash in on a sicker healthcare system (America: you are here) and tell us it's the only way to do it (America and London and Paris: you are here), and I wish it took a healthier portion even though it makes poor-kid me a little sad if I can't keep more for myself. But that's how it is, because that's the contract we all enter into by existing in this region under the rules we vote on and upheld by people we choose.