Thursday, October 22, 2009

MOPNS doesn't know difference between public option and single-payer

MOPNS, or as I like to call it MORPS (the Missouri Republican Propaganda Service) is apparently competing with "OMG, SEIU employees work for SEIU!!" Jim Durbin for the most inane 'scandal' of 2009, in a field already crowded by hyperventilating teabaggers.  Yesterday, MOPNS claimed that Governor Jay Nixon stated that "healthcare" would not be in the final federal bill "in the world I live in."  Pretty darn scandalous, right?  Except when you realize that Nixon was talking about a single-payer healthcare system (one in which only the government provides healthcare insurance and private companies are abolished), and that single-payer hasn't really been seriously discussed in congress since this whole debate started.  The whole discussion right now is whether there will be a government run public option in the final bill, not single-payer, and the fact that MOPNS thinks Nixon's comment was scandalous is pretty strong evidence that the writer doesn't even understand what the debate is about.  

I don't think MOPNS is alone.  Wingnut blogging about this subject generally shows that they literally don't grasp what the actual conversation is about.  They routinely conflate Baucus's bill with Obama's plan and every other plan, and seem to think that every one of them is a single-payer plan.  Unfortunately, for most wingnuts, actually doing some research beyond listening to Rush Limbaugh is just too much to expect.

1 comment:

  1. A generally conservative friend of mine used his unpleasant experience at the post office recently as an anology for why he's against "big government". I simply explained to him that he didn't HAVE to us the USPS. He could have used FedEx or UPS, which are private companies, and then explained that the proposal of a public option would work the same way. You can use the government provided service, or choose a private company. Perhaps if we used this analogy with all teabaggers, they might finally get it? Probably not.

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