It's interesting usc, if you look at these townhall meetings, at least 75% of the protesters are seniors. And, polls are showing a majority of people over 50 are against health care reform, while a majority of people under 50, are for it.
I read a great piece and I forget who wrote it, but in it they made the case that seniors have been on shitty private health care, and now they are on medicare, and they ain't going back, and their worst fear is that an expansion of medicare to the general population is going to take what they have and love away from them.
I think this jives with the known information.
And anecdotally, my aunt had to have fibroid tumors removed in her gyno's office without any sort of anesthesia. I will never forget her talking about, this must be 20 years ago. It was awful. She had no health care. I remember her sitting right in my kitchen asking why we couldn't have "socialized health care" like they do in England. Her daughter (my cousin) had done one of those foreign exchange things in high school. So the family had gotten to know this English girl, Jackie. And my aunt said "Jackie raves about it".
Anyway, fast foward to now, she married a right wing f*ck (and I mean a real right wing f*ck) and now she is a teabagger! She called my mom up and mentioned she was going to a teabagging event, and my mom says, oh a high tea! I'm going to one of those too isn't that weird! Because my mom and her husband had these tickets for some high tea thing in NYC. And then my mom realized what she was talking about. It was pretty akward. High tea vs teabagging...that says it all.
anyway, she is a miserable woman with a miserable marriage, and has always been very selfish. The bottom line is, back when she had to go through an awful, painful experience, she was all for outright socialized medicine, and now she is on socialized medicine, and she's all, I got mine too bad about you.
And that is what is in the heart of every right winger I have ever known. I got mine, too bad about you.
