Dear Meghan McCain: You had Government Healthcare
Meghan McCain spent the last season on The View as the conservative counter-balance to the liberalism of Whoopi Goldberg. While certainly not an easy position (I wouldn’t take up a job on Fox and Friends for similar reasons), I noticed a glaring hypocrisy in her anti-socialism rants. She doesn’t like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez because she doesn’t want America to be a socialist country. She spreads panic about Canada’s healthcare system even when actual Canadians rip on her. But here’s the funny thing about Mrs. Anti-Socialism: This trust fund baby received government healthcare!
As an immediate family-member of a sitting Senator, she got access to an extremely generous government healthcare plan. She didn’t earn it. She didn’t work for it. She was simply born to the right government official. And while it’s probable that she has a private one now, it’s doubtful that she had that private-sector one while her mom was pregnant with her or throughout her childhood. There can be no doubt she benefited from socialism at some point in her life and doesn’t want anyone else to get the same benefits unless they’re like her (and we all know what that’s code for).
Kind of like most anti-socialists up to and including Ayn Rand (look it up, she got Medicare).
Government healthcare for Meghan McCain, voluntarism for us
Think about it. This anti-socialist trust fund baby got a full government healthcare plan for being born to John McCain. Like all trust fund babies, she never had to hear the words “pre-existing condition.” She never had to hear that a medical underwriter ghoul found an obscure reason to throw her off her insurance plan the minute she went to utilize it. Those “benefits” of capitalism were only for us little folks.
If we can’t get a private-sector plan or Medicaid (which anti-socialists hate with a burning passion unless they are on it), we are reduced to desperation. We had to hope we were accepted in the high-risk pools (assuming it hadn’t collapsed because the states often deliberately underfunded them and the insurance industry threw as many people as they possibly could into them). We have to hope the local charity accepts our case (assuming there is one operating in our area). We have to pray that the news media picks up our GoFundMe and potential donors believe we’re worthy of life. We have to get our churches to hold bake sales and spaghetti dinners and hope we sell enough to not die. And be told that if we want to change this, that if we want a better healthcare system for the poor than grovelling on GoFundMe, we’re told we’re unAmerican.
We’ve been entirely too polite about the hypocrisy
We all know people like Meghan McCain in our families. They’re the farmers who shake their fists at anyone who thinks the Federal government should do more than run the military but have no problem with taking farm subsidies. They’re the special needs parents who squeal about every unfavorable NHS outcome in the U.K. but wouldn’t conceive of giving up their child’s Medicaid for voluntarism or relying on the church. Coincidentally, despite how much they claim to care about babies like Alfie Evans and Charlie Gard, they never talk about the horrible things that have been done to the U.K.’s disabled population in the name of Tory austerity. They’re the small business owners who go on food stamps if things go South for them but engage in (often racially-charged) rants about other people on food stamps.
And we usually say very little about it. When they start going on their rants we just nod and be polite. We never call them on it. We never talk about how they received government aid because it’s viewed as personal. Maybe we should get over that.
When your farmer family member starts ranting about the Feds, talk to them about the crop subsidies they get if they get them. If your special needs parent family member goes off about socialized medicine, ask them who is paying for their child’s healthcare and therapy. It’s probably not the church. If your friend who went on food stamps during lean times starts talking smack about other people on food stamps, fire back. Don’t let them act like it’s morally wrong for other people to get help but just fine if they get it.
And above all else, Tweet to anti-socialist trust fund babies like Meghan McCain and ask when they’ll be repaying the taxpayers for all the government aid they received and insist is bad if we receive (she has not responded to my Tweets yet).
And Whoopi, if you read this, next time Meghan rants about government healthcare, please tell her how she benefited from the government healthcare she says is wrong for poor people to receive. She’s due for a Guinan epiphany.