Saturday, October 23, 2010

The New Virginia Foxx Narrative on Health Care

The first time we heard Foxx come out with this bit of "history" about health care in America was at the Boone Area Chamber of Commerce candidate forum. Then she repeated it word for word last night in Sparta at a candidate forum up there. It goes like this.
I was so poor growing up [that we had to eat dust bunnies that we swept out from under the bed] but back then we all had health care. Health care only became unavailable and too expensive after Medicare was legislated in the 1960s.

Yeah, right.

I grew up poor too (those dust bunnies aren't bad if you have a few carrots and some cornbread stuffing!) in probably an even more rural landscape, and we did not have health care beyond what our mothers could conjure up out of Vaseline and a little coal oil. There was no doctor in our community, no clinic, no nurses, nothing. Which is why so many farmers were visibly maimed by scars and breaks and lost limbs. Stepping on a rusty nail in that country was about as dangerous as snakebite, because you probably weren't going to reach a doctor with a hypodermic before tetanus set in.

Foxx's rosy "everything was fine before there was a social safety net" is just so much buffalo dust.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Foxx's rosy "everything was fine before there was a social safety net" is just so much buffalo dust. * JW

Yeah! I am sure Virgina Health Care took care of those Tommyhawk chops by those pesty indians that hung around her cabin in Hew York City during her early childhood

RV said...

Yes, Virginia - health care is more expensive now, but it is not because of Medicare. It is because the technological advances that have led to better outcomes are more costly. They didn't have MRI's and CT-Scans back then. Which meant that the doctors were not always able to determine what was wrong, so conditions were left untreated and nature took its course. Answer honestly, Virginia. Do you personally want to go back to the much more limited medical care that was available then?