You Kids Get Off My Lawn

John Cole brings up a damn good point:

I read somewhere that the fact that our seniors are all covered by medicare really makes health care reform difficult. When the most reliable voting bloc already has their coverage paid for by the state, all the Republicans have to do is peel off a few other haves and convince the old folks that Obama wants to euthanize them.

Why should senior citizens want health care for everyone else? There's really nothing in it for them. If you assume there's a finite number of doctors in America (there is) and a finite number of hospital beds (there is) and the major thing keeping people out of using those resources is cost, if you reduce that barrier so that more of those resources are being used, then while that's great for people who don't have health care, it's not so great for the people already getting it.

And still, that Gallup Poll that John was referencing still has a plurality of all age groups convinced that health care reform will be more expensive and make their own health care worse. Sixteen plus years of health insurance companies promising that the "government will ruin health care" has taken too much of a toll at this point. It's been ingrained into Americans that government is incable of improving the situation, no matter how bad the current status quo is. And after eight years of Bush, well...government hasn't exactly acquitted itself. After Katrina and Iraq and Afghanistan and the everything, would you? Even I have to admit that I can perfectly understand why people would think this way.

The problem is we know that the status quo is unsustainable. Something has to be done, but people are convinced the solution is worse than the problem. If there's a lasting legacy of the Bush years, it's that people in my generation will never trust the government again, even if it's not Bush's government.