This is a horrifying, inhumane, uncivilized concept. Why the American public simply accepts this is mind-boggling.
Also, people do not evaluate things independently and rely on pundits like Glenn Beck or Rachel Maddow to evaluate the situation and give them an opinion. Glenn Beck and the rest of the Fox News/right-side cadre tell everyone that health care reform is socialism, our system is the greatest in the world already, the government can't do anything right, and we'll all be turned into savages because socialism will steal our morals and make our children sniveling, awful thieves and layabouts. This is Glenn Beck's position mainly because the President is currently a Democrat. Maddow says the opposite of course.
Media in the US works by validating the opinion of your target audience, and doing this in an emotionally gratifying way that sounds like you are being logical and reasonable, and gives people little soundbites they can use to justify their position. People listen to Beck, Hannity, et al because they enjoy the emotional experience that it induces -- they like the righteous anger and validation of their beliefs, they are gratified by blaming all of the problems on the people that have an opposing viewpoint. They enjoy hearing little snippets that can be used to justify their (adopted) political positions in a sentence to a friend or colleague. It's just easier this way, and doesn't require any intellectual effort.
In short, it's all about flattery. People give you money, influence, and power when you spend all day flattering them, irrespective of its basis in reality.
There's a lot of misinformation out there.
The majority of Americans also have passable health coverage, so since it doesn't affect them, the people that are not politically inclined are not particularly interested in the debate and they don't understand the difficulty for people that aren't happy to be bound to BigCo forever.
This applies as well to pundits on other regions of the political spectrum. Are so many of us really so hollow now? (Unfortunately, the market says: yes.)
Of course! There is no real cure for cancer: look at the 5-year survival statistics.
But there _are_ innumerable agencies and non-profits that will take your last dollar and promise you "hope". They will do this for you or for your child who has cancer. Their purpose is to make money. Amazingly, people will spend their last dollar to "cure" their own cancer. To "save" their children they will borrow money against their future or that of their relatives and friends.
We spend most of our medical dollars trying to put off the inevitable (death from old age and cancer). Instead we should learn, as a nation, that it is OK to die, hopefully gracefully, if a bit sooner.
