From
Investors Business Daily:
“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless."
The fact that Stephen Hawking was born and has lived his entire life in the U.K. without being euthanized even once apparently slipped under their fact-checking radar. This is not surprising, since the sort of right-wing fuck-ups who like to fling about the words "socialism" and "liberal" as if they're the deadliest insults known to man, and who can emit such cretinous bullshit as "health care is not a right" with both straight faces and sincerity in their black little hearts, are rarely the sort of people who actually give a flying goddamn about things like "truth," "facts" and "honesty."
If Stephen Hawking had been born in the United States, he may have turned out just fine; his father was a research biologist, a position which generally pays fairly well and moreover is often the sort of career that leads to long-term employment which offers decent medical benefits. As the only thing which matters in American healthcare as it stands is how much money you make and whether you're smart, patient and tenacious enough to make your insurance actually pay for the things it claims it will, it does seem rather likely that he would have survived just fine despite his physical handicaps. Had his parents' financial situation been otherwise, of course, the story would be very different - which is not the case in the UK, where the National Health Service actually treats people without checking their wallets beforehand.
But that's only what's right, isn't it, the American way of doing things? After all, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the only reason anyone would ever
not have money is because they're too lazy to work. Anyone who has any gumption at all finds a way to pick themselves up by their bootstraps; therefore, being poor isn't an economic issue, but a social one, a sign of moral failing. If you're poor, the popular understanding goes, you deserve to be poor, because you're a lazy fuck-up who doesn't know what's good for you and should probably just throw yourself under a train so you'll stop being a drain upon the social services that other people's tax dollars paid for. It's self-evident: if you
weren't a lazy fuck-up, you wouldn't be poor! So get right on that, you stupid lazy asshole, there's a train track down the road. (If you weren't such a goddamn good-for-nothing shitheap, you could GET A JOB ON THE TRAIN or something, but no. Fucking poor person.)
It's hard for me to even attempt a coherent column here, partly because I'm terribly out of practice and partly because every time I think about this topic it throws me into a violent rage that makes me want to throw molotovs at government buildings and set conservatives on fire with a hairspray-and-Zippo flamethrower. There's no debating with these people; they have their fingers firmly lodged in their ears as they repeat "NA NA NA NA I CAN'T HEAR YOU YOU ARE TALKING SOCIALISM YOUR FACTS CAN EAT A DICK NA NA NA THE AMERICAN WAY NA NA NA BOOTSTRAPS OH GOD WHAT WHY AM I SUDDENLY ON FIRE"
Offspring -
Stuff Is Messed Up (
website)
Neil's Children -
Indifference Is Vital (
website)
The Thermals -
We Were Sick (
website)
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