‘Tis better to receive than to support
Time and time again, vociferous opponents of state-run health care end up ironically voicing support for the very policies they oppose. Saturday, Sarah Palin told a Canadian crowd in Calgary that her family “used to hustle over the border for health care we received in Canada. And I think now, isn’t that ironic.” Well, yes, it is.
And Sue Lowden, running against Harry Reid this year in Nevada, is running ads saying both that Reid’s plan would “weaken Medicare” and that “government-run health care is wrong.”
All politics / partisanship aside, what gives? Seems to me the psychological phenomenon at play here stems from cognitive dissonance theory: events or arguments that clearly disconfirm or contradict our strongly-held beliefs are unlikely to change those beliefs. Instead, we end up awkwardly ignoring these blatant contradictions or treating the dissonant factors as separate; Medicare, in our minds, is an established American tradition but a public option would be socialist, even tyrannical paternalism.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said that the mark of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas at the same time while retaining the ability to function… What, then, do we make of those who would gladly receive government benefits while calling for their elimination?
-Colin
Related posts:
- Compromise
- Tea Partyers for Medicare
- Where are the Liberals?
- Health care overload: whither inequality?
- Rationing health care?
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