Need help trying to sway someone. He writes:

[CurtEastPoint]

It just seems that all that cost a lot of money and dont have it. And Im not sure about his healthcare. Do you think it appears to help a lot of people that dont want to help themselves. Im not taking a hard stand on any of it. I just feel like Im not informed enough. I think the health care is a good thing but I think we have a lot of lazy ass people that will have less of a reason to do stuff. I think those that dont have healthcare and dont have jobs should give something back through soup kitchens and gov labor.

What is the underlying message here?

[Spider Jerusalem]

1. The underlying message is hard-ass Calvinism

"if you're poor, it's because you're lazy and wicked and sinful and you deserve it". Bet this person is a Southern Baptist. "Are there no workhouses?"

[Scuba]

6. Plenty of Wisconsin Lutherans feel exactly the same way.

[Spider Jerusalem]

9. Yep but in this instance "East Point" is a giveaway

(it's in Fulton County, Georgia), so "Southern Baptist" seems like a much more likely guess.

And Lutherans believe in a slightly less extreme form of predestination: salvation is by god's will, damnation is your own fault and freely elected through lack of repentance...which if anything seems somewhat more incoherent than the Calvinist position.

[CurtEastPoint]

10. He lives in Cobb County. But yes, I'm in EP.

[NYC_SKP]

2. Underlying message: "I am a stupid ass bigot".

He/she/we pay for everyone's health care, or lack of it, whether or not it's ObamaCare, this person doesn't get it, would prefer people go to emergency rooms, a la Romney.

Stupid bigot.

Use of the word "lazy" is the giveaway.

[Indpndnt]

3. Tell him he's lazy for being this close to an election and not researching major issues.

He's not sure about healthcare? Google. Read. He's incredibly lazy as well as ignorant.

[LWolf]

5. THAT's the way to turn a vote your way.

Tell him he's lazy.

[Indpndnt]

15. The guy's going on about lazy people getting healthcare and losing motivation to work for it.

He's not voting our way, no matter what. Maybe, just maybe, if someone calls him lazy, he'll realize someday how ridiculous he's being thinking the same about so many other people. If not, no loss there.

Btw, I missed your ideas of what the OP should say or do.

[LWolf]

17. You didn't see it because I didn't offer it.

Since you asked, I'd take the guy seriously and answer him seriously; he may have been "going on" with right wing talking points, but he sounded open to hearing other ideas to me.

[kentuck]

4. We would have a balanced budget right now if...

...our healthcare costs could be brought down to the same percentage as other industrialized countries, including those with socialized medicine.

[FSogol]

7. We are paying for everybody anyway. With insurance, they are more likely

to get preventative care which is cheaper than using emergency room resources. Anyone who thinks this is a bad idea doesn't understand how insurance works. They more people in the group, the more the costs are spread around. The less people in a pool, the more costly.

[raging moderate]

8. Most of them are already working.

Most of the people whose income is too low to justify payment of federal income tax are working full-time, but their employers are not paying them a living wage. To the "job creators" who want these people to pay taxes, I have a message: Give these employees a raise! Others among them are disabled, or too old to work. Especially at the back-breaking, arm-wrenching, knee-grating, foot-crushing labor to which they have been consigned. I have done waitress, cafeteria, cleaning, factory, and farm work in my time. The way these people are treated is ALREADY outrageous. Furthermore, many of these people DO volunteer work already. Mitt Romney is not putting in a weekly shift at a soup kitchen or a homeless facility or an animal shelter. Most of his fellow millionaires (probably billionaires) are not. I HAVE done volunteer work, and I know who I met there. The government labor idea, at this point, might be a good idea. That is why the Romneyites oppose it so vehemently.

[DURHAM D]

11. Switch the health care issues to seniors and Medicare.

"Older Americans have paid into the system all their working life and now that they are old enough to use what they have already paid for Romney and Ryan want to break the 45 year old contract. If those two would do that do older Americans imagine what they will do to the younger generation."

His last sentence seems to indicate he wants a New New Deal.

[cpa]

12. Health Care

Please inform this writer that the Congressional Budget Office has stated that the Affordable Healthcare Act will reduce the budget deficit. Second, before the healthcare Act, insurance companies could refuse to cover people due to pre-existing conditions. They can no longer do that. Children now have to be covered on their parents' policies until they are 27 years old.
I have been hearing about "lazy" people who are unwilling to work all of my life. The fact is that most people who are unemployed want to work. They just can't find jobs. Another fact that economists like Paul Krugman have informed me is that the stimulus bill should have been larger. That is almost universal among economists. Now, there is an Investment Act that would have created 1,000,000 jobs and did needed repairs to our infrastructure that was blocked by the Republicans in Congress. Actually, those Republicans in Congress are "lazy ass " people because they have done nothing to solve problems.
The tax cuts to the upper 1% and the mismanaged wars have "cost a lot of money." Raising the highest marginal tax rate from 35% to 39.6% on those with taxable incomes over $275,000 would help with the deficit and pay a lot of this cost.
There are some people who don't want to help themselves, like your friend says. There always will be some. But there is not as many as your friend says. The vast majorityof people who are currently unemployed want to work and help themselves.

[TheKentuckian]

13. Why the hell does he think unable to afford insurance equals lazy?

People firmly in the "middle class" will be getting partial subsidies and even minimum wage workers will be mandated to fork over about 8% to the insurance cartel that they cannot afford.

He is digging for any excuse to vote for Weird WilLIARd and that is where this dumpsterfuck's heart is.

[JHB]

14. Ask him how many people he thinks "don't want to help themselves"...

...and start comparing numbers. For instance, one of Matt Taibi's articles in Rolling Stone covered how Mitt put the FDIC on the hook for $10million back in the 90s. I dug up how much welfare and food stamps were at the time (a couple of minutes on Google found a number for a single mother with two children), and compared. Mitt put the taxpayers (including your someone) on the hook for slightly more than 1420 poor families. One guy, in one deal.

Then think about all those "cost plus" contracts in Iraq, where contractors would do everything to load up the bill (house personnel in luxury hotels in Kuwait, abandon equipment for so much as a flat tire, etc.) because the federal government would pay for all of it plus a percentage for the company's profit, so the bigger their bill the bigger their profit. Not to mention the few billion in cash that was sent over with, to put it politely, very poor accounting measures.

They always try to play on the idea that all our financial woes are due to over-generosity to a vast army of moochers and layabouts. In the 80s the talking point was to highlight the percentage of the federal budget that went to entitlements and then switch to talking about welfare (when by far most of that big scary entitlement number was Social Security and Medicare which the audience fully supported, not welfare). In the 90s conservative think tanks put out the factoid that we'd spent $5 trillion on anti-poverty programs, but once again the number was vastly inflated by including tax breaks and other programs that mostly affected middle class families (e.g., home mortgage deductions).

And now the talking point is the percentage that after all legal credits and deductions has no liability for income tax, usually phrased more starkly, such as "47% don't pay taxes" in order to imply they half the country is just sitting around on the dole.

They always puff up the numbers of "lazy ass people" because if that's the problem the solution is very different from dealing with a situation where a great many people are struggling to get by no matter how hard they bust their ass, and fixing the latter would cut into the profits of people that can afford to spend money on lobbyists.

[Festivito]

16. Muddled ill-writ lazy-thinker projecting upon others hoping to moralize his personal greed ..

through a smoke screen of un-auditable fear.

He doesn't need you to sway him. He needs a team of professionals.