Political Irony

People who are fighting for health care reform should learn a lesson from their opponents and become less reality based. To help this, I modestly propose ten talking points that show how health care reform can appeal to everyone, including conservatives, insurance companies, and even the media:

1. Health care reform will immensely help the conservative cause by showing Medicare, the Veterans Administration, the Postal Service, public highways, national parks, the military, police, and fire departments as the evil socialist monstrosities they truly are; we will quickly abolish them all and revert to compassionate free market principles. Who needs a military when wars can be treated as corporate takeovers?
2. Who doesn’t want to see Sarah Palin stand in front of a death panel? Even her most fervent supporters would enjoy giving her another outlet.
3. It would help the economy to euthanize all those non-productive old people. It is their fault that health care costs are so high, anyway.
4. The money that the insurance and pharmaceutical industries are pumping into ads fighting health care reform is pretty much the only thing keeping most television stations afloat. Without health care reform to endlessly vilify, the Fox News Channel (if they even survive) would probably be reduced to reruns of interviews with birthers.
5. Three words: “Joe the Doctor”.
6. Investor’s Business Daily said that people such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t stand a chance under a nationalized health care system. Heck, this is a guy who fifty years ago was diagnosed with a terminal disease and given three years to live, who has solved many challenging mysteries of the universe while not being able to speak, authored a dozen books and papers without being able to write, and has a wife and three children despite being completely paralyzed. I’m sure he’s now bored and would welcome another challenge.
7. If our government is as corrupt and incompetent as conservatives want it to be, then any health care reform that makes it through Congress will turn out to be a big corporate give-away to the health insurance companies (just like the Medicare prescription drug benefit that Dubya got passed). So insurance companies will benefit! Why should banks get all the rewards of government corruption and cronyism?
8. The Liberty Counsel warns that the health reform bills in Congress will establish school-based ‘health’ clinics that will indoctrinate your children. Have you tried to talk to any young people lately? I say they could definitely use some heavy-duty indoctrination!
9. Pro-life groups say that the health care bills will fund abortions. Since a majority of Americans are pro-choice, this should be a big selling point. I say this even though none of the current bills would actually fund any abortions. After all, the pro-life crowd kept voting for neocons like Dubya, despite the fact that they never actually tried to outlaw abortions or did anything to reduce the number of abortions. Just the hint that health reform will fund abortions should make it popular with the pro-choice majority.
10. Our friends at Liberty Counsel also claim that the health care bill will likely cover sex change surgery. So even the LGBT crowd has something to like about reform.