What’s noticable is that the “debate” isn’t about the need for healthcare, or about actual medical issues. It’s about ideology, and outlook … Near as I can work it out from over here (caveat: I’ve spent somewhere between four and eight months of my life in the USA — this doesn’t make me an expert) there is a small but significant proportion of the US population who hate the poor and want them to die. (Or at least to go somewhere where they’re invisible and can’t act as a perpetual reminder to the haters that their own security is at best tenuous.)
I’m not sure why there’s this hatred — my personal feeling is that it springs from numerous sources: from prosperity theology (if you’re poor it’s because you’re ungodly and deserve to suffer), insecurity, lack of empathy, or a combination of these factors in different people. Other observers have different theories: M’Learned Friend opines that it’s because the American conservative movement rejects Rawls’s preconditions for justice. (That doesn’t go far enough for my taste; they also seem to want to reject the entire concept of the Social Contract.)
And then there’s the growing tendency towards eliminationist rhetoric against socially sanctioned out-groups. (Arguably the endorsement of maltreatment of convicts is an emergent part of this trend, feeding into and normalising it.) .
The subjects vary — crime and penal policy, healthcare, don’t get me started on foreign policy — but there is an ideological approach in America that is distinguished by one common characteristic: words and deeds utterly lacking in the quality of mercy.
There is a cancer in the collective American soul — a mercy deficit that has in recent years grown as alarmingly as the budget deficit. Nor is it as simple as a left/right thing: no political party has a monopoly on merciless behaviour. Rather, a creeping draconian absolutism has cast its penumbra across the entire arena of public discourse, tainting every debate, poisoning and hardening attitudes across the board.
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