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So I’m back. Not much seems to have changed since I’ve been away — Pennsylvania still doesn’t have a state budget, for one thing. The birther nonsense has died down, but only to be replaced by a new laughable conspiracy theory — the notion that President Obama’s healthcare reform involves “death panels” of government bureaucrats deciding when to pull the plug on grandma.
After being outside the country for 10 days, I can tell you that the picture we present of ourselves in these debates isn’t pretty. For example, I actually got to see our very own Arlen Specter being shouted down by one of his mad-as-hell constituents, Katy Abram of Lebanon, Pa.
“This is about the systematic dismantling of this country,” she insisted to Specter. “I am only 35 years old, I’ve never been interested in politics … I don’t like this country turning into Russia, turning into a socialized country. My question for you is, what are you going to do to restore this country back to what our fathers created according to the Constitution?”
Abram was just one of many Americans shouting down their elected officials at these gatherings. Abram, however, set herself apart by actually agreeing to an an interview on MSNBC’s Hardball afterwards.
Fair warning: Even for those of us who disagree with Abram, this is painful viewing. It hurts to watch, much like it hurts to see a comedian bomb.
To be honest, after seeing the town-hall shoutfests on TV, my first thought was that these folks might be GOP operatives, fanning out into the countryside. I’ve argued before that the Republican strategy seems to be not so much opposing Democratic ideas, but opposing the idea of ideas themselves — opposing logic and reason. Shouting at your elected officials so they can’t get a word in edgewise, obviously, would be a perfect tactic for such a strategy.
But after watching the Hardball interview, conducted by fill-in host Lawrence O’Donnell, I’ve decided that my theory is too simplistic. If people like Katy Abram WERE Republican operatives, they’d be a lot better prepared for interviews like this one. And anyway, the GOP doesn’t have to carry out a campaign to make Americans like Abrams ill-informed: We’re already there.
In the interview, it quickly becomes obvious that once Mrs. Abram voices her bromides against socialism, she doesn’t have anything left to say. On Hardball, she says that one concern she has about healthcare is the cost. Her family owns their own business, she says, and “The amount of taxes we pay out on that, it’s ridiculous.”
O’Donnell points out, though, that the President has pledged only to raise taxes on people who make $250,000 a year. Does her family qualify?
“Honestly, I’d rather not say,” Abram says. “I don’t even know. My husband takes care of the bills and everything. He takes care of us, and that’s all that matters.”
So while Abram doesn’t know how much income her family earned, she’s sure the taxes on that income are “ridiculous.” Ohhhhhkaaaaay.
It develops that the Abrams family has a Health Savings Account, a delightful device championed by our very own Rick Santorum. Their HSA is structured such that the first $5,000 of health expenses a year — prescriptions, doctor’s visits, etc. — are paid for right out of the family’s pocket. This year, their son may need repeated surgery — but on the bright side, Abram says, they may now reach the $5,000 threshhold when the HSA kicks in, “so that’s a good thing.”
It won’t surprise you that Abram hasn’t thought through her GOP talking points. Asked if she wants her parents to not use Medicare — which is a government-funded single-payer health plan — she says “We don’t talk politics.”
Would she favor repealing Social Security?
“I hate to say yes or no.”
“I hate to have words put in my mouth,” she adds. But by this point, it’s clear that she doesn’t have many words of her own.
For me, the key moment in the interview comes when O’Donnell asks why it took THIS issue for Abram to get interested in politics. O’Donnell pointed out that in recent years, the United states has been through 9/11 and two different wars, among other things.
“How could those things pass through your life like this and not spark any interest in politics, prior to Washington saying ‘we think we want to help out some people can’t afford insurance the way you can’?” he asks. “Why would this be the thing that wakes you up …?”
Abram’s answer:
“I always seemed to have faith in the government, and honestly, I didn’t really care. I had other things going on — getting married, having children. It wasn’t a priority in my life … Maybe I’m just not that smart, but it seems like … we’re [always] having some kind of conflict. I don’t know, that just seems commonplace now, I think everybody’s just so used to it.”
So there you have it. Katy Abram is a perfectly pleasant woman living in Lebanon, Pa. And it troubles her conscience not a whit that her country seems constantly at war. What really pisses her off isn’t the fact that her government is constantly killing people in other countries — it’s that her government might want to do something to help her own neighbors.
But I feel guilty picking on Katy Abram. The thing is … the person in that interview (as distinct from the person yelling at poor Arlen Specter) seems genuinely likeable. She’s self-effacing, modest, charming. I’ll bet she’s a great mom, and a nice neighbor. I’d like to have her living next door.
More than that: I wouldn’t mind paying a bit more in taxes so the Abrams family could have a decent healthcare plan. It seems sad and mean that there are people in my state who are actually hoping their kid’s operation will cost more than $5,000, just so someone ELSE can pay the bill for a change. If you believe in universal health coverage — as I do — then that means you want everyone to have a good insurance plan, even people you don’t like or, as in this case, people whose obvious silliness is deeply unsettling.
You could argue that any sympathy for Mrs. Abram is misplaced. Nobody forced her to show up at a public meeting and denounce a Senator, or to accept the invitation from Hardball. She chose to put her own ignorance on display, and if letting her do so on a national cable TV show seems cruel, well … tough shit.
But hey, I’m a liberal — blaming society for people’s mistakes is what I do. And in fairness, can you fault Abram for thinking she could just come on the air, spout Republican talking points, not look stupid? That’s how everyone ELSE does it. Abram appears no more ill-informed than Sarah Palin or Pat Buchanan … and if Palin could be the GOP’s nominee for vice-president, why shouldn’t Abram have 15 minutes of fame? Or even a spot on a Sunday morning talk-show panel? Why not make her the next Joe the Plumber?
The irony of all this, of course, is that of all the dubious government spending that goes on, the program that turns Abram into a raving lunatic at a town-hall forum is the one program that might actually do her some good. She says she opposed bank bailouts too … but she apparently didn’t REALLY get upset until somebody offers a government program that could help HER family. That’s how bollixed up our political discourse is these days.
Maybe this shouldn’t be surprising: The whole premise of conservatives — especially the sort that would invest in a Health Savings Account — is “We can take care of ourselves, thank you very much.” I’m sure seeing your tax dollars go to help bankers, or people on welfare, is a constant irritant. But for Abram, it’s only when a program threatens to help YOU that it becomes oppressive … because those programs are the ones that attack your self-image as a self-reliant American, somebody who doesn’t rely on anyone else.
So maybe Abram got exactly what she wanted. She didn’t want the world to do her any favors … and the folks at Hardball certainly weren’t guilty of that. I hope she’s happy, wherever she is. And that her kid’s operation is REALLY expensive. She deserves a break.
This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2009.
OK, to be fair I watched the Abram interview just now. You’re right, it is painful to watch. You get the impression that any authoritative figure (probably would have to be a well dressed white male with a good vocabulary) could sway her. But I suspect Fox News is what is on the TV in her house, at least when news is on. No BBC World News for her.
I also suspect that while her family does have a high deductible/HSA health plan, if they have had it for a number of years they probably are paying some health expenses out of the thousands, possibly tens of thousands of dollars in the Health Savings Account. Her husband probably pays the bills and she probably has no idea how her families’ medical costs are paid for. Another thing she is probably not aware of is that her family probably buys insurance directly rather than as part of a group, and that insurance has probably been going up in cost even faster than employer based group coverage. Her family is one of the groups that would benefit most from the Single Payer insurance that is not even being considered.
But what I really wanted to draw attention to in this comment is first a post at fivethirtyeight.com. Nate Silver gives us a comment about a WSJ/NBC poll: “Also, while just 36 percent believe Obama’s efforts to reform the health system are a good idea, that number increases to 53 percent when respondents were read a paragraph describing Obama’s plans”
So when people actually know what the health care proposals say, 17 percent reverse themselves, and a majority of people polled actually support the proposals. Yet even in the comments of that post a conservative tried to say that there was only 36 percent support because people knew that Obama is planning death panels and socialism.
The second thing is I wanted to ask if you saw Meet the Press on Sunday. Dick Armey put on an impressive show there (and I mean that in the most negative way possible), as part of a panel with Rachel Maddow, Tom Daschle and Tom Coburn. When Dick Gregory started the discussion by bringing up the signs at Town Hall meetings depicting Obama as Hitler, Armey immediately said that Moveon.org had “run ads” doing the same thing to George Bush. In fact that was false (I’ll let people Google it), but Armey was able to immediately put the liberals on the defensive, and turn the discussion into a battle of confusing assertions and unsupported “facts”.
Honestly, I think even the dimmest Limbaugh fan has to be hearing that a lot of what the conservatives say about health care/insurance reform is lies. But they would rather believe what seems safe, that the world is a giant conspiracy against them. Welcome to the new Poplawski/Sodini reality.
I did see part of “Meet the Press” (though not the segment you are referring to). I thought Maddow held her own, as she always seems to, but I missed Russert, who might have done a better job of refereeing the factual nonsense going on there.
As for Abram … obviously, if she can barely assess her family’s financial well-being, I’m not going to be able to either. My suspicion, as I sketched out above, is that you’re right — there’s at least a chance her family WOULD benefit from an overhaul of the healthcare system. You’d think she’d at least be open to the possibility, rather than just shutting it out as “socialism.” That’s what bothers me most … not that she’s opposed to health-care reform on policy grounds, but that she’s opposing the real thing based on a caricature of it.
In fact, you raise what I think is the key point here: whether any of us Americans know what the hell we are talking about when it comes to an issue like this. It’s ironic that Abram wants to go back to the days of the founders … because the founders had a VERY skeptical view of the ability of the electorate to make good choices, hence the creation of institutions like the Electoral College. And after watching some of the footage from that town hall, I have to admit that maybe the founders had a point.
But of course, we should be careful what we wish for. The original Constitution — for which Mrs. Abram expressed such nostalgia — didn’t give women the right to vote. And Senators weren’t even elected directly by the people. If America were still governed by the spirit of the original founders, Mrs. Abram probably would never have had a chance to confront Arlen Specter in the first place.
Most likely Mrs. Abram would not care if she didn’t have the right to vote. Her husband would take care of her and her children, so why would she worry her pretty little head about voting?
Chris, I absolutely missed Russert on Sunday too, for pretty much the same reason. I hate to pick sides, I want to be able to take ideas from both sides, but I was pretty disgusted by the representatives of the Republicans. All they have to do is lie convincingly, they do not need to actually establish a case…
The nostalgia for the America of the founding fathers is baffling to me as well. Do we want to bring back slavery? No one except white male property owners able to vote? Even that constitutionalist Scalia channels the founding fathers view of modern technology in his own particular way. One of the reasons Scalia gave for overturning handgun bans in cities was the unique characteristics of handguns making them so ideal for home defense; you can hold the handgun in one hand and dial the phone to contact the police with the other. It’s not clear what you do when you run out of bullets …
It is fair enough that you point out a lot of us might not know much about the details of health care/insurance reform. I worked for a while at Blue Cross and make an effort to keep up, yet I couldn’t tell you much of the specifics of any of the bills going through Congress, Democratic (possible to pass) or Republican (ha ha).
You can see why Obama wanted to be done with healthcare/insurance reform before August. Now we are in a period of free fall; conservatives can say any outrageous thing they want, sway some of the rural know-nothings, frighten Democratic members of Congress and generally muddy the waters. And liberals (whose different groups are increasingly seeming to fragment themselves) have to respond and meticulously take apart the conservatives arguments. Meanwhile, every time the conservatives do score a hit on healthcare/insurance reform (as with the death panels thing), they crow about the dip in the polls and claim that Americans are against Obama.
And people like this Abram woman only care about politics now that a black man is in the White House. Give me a break …
“And people like this Abram woman only care about politics now that a black man is in the White House.”
>>> While I agree with the larger part of your argument, I think it’s unfair to tag Abram with the implication that she’s racist. As much as I oppose almost everything that came out of her mouth during her public appearences, I don’t know what’s in her heart. And nothing I’ve heard her say smacked of any kind of racism to me. (And let’s remember that Bill Clinton attracted plenty of knee-jerk, ill-informed opposition when HE made a stab at reforming healthcare …)
This is the game the other side plays — trying to attach a bunch of hateful labels (traitors, socialists, etc.) to the people they disagree with. Naturally, it’s really tempting to use the same tactics in reprisal … and I confess I’ve given into that temptation myself from time to time. But like I said, I don’t hate Katy Abram — if Obama can deliver a good health-care plan, I’d like her to be able to reap the benefits.
Well, you’re probably expressing the right sentiment, but I can’t help but have my suspicions … (frowns, glares sideways)
Anyway, the Abram woman (and the rest of us) benefiting from health insurance reform would be … satisfying.