RW "Give me your sandwich" video

[ErikJ]

I received this via RW chain mail this morning which is probably making waves on the right these days. They refer to it as the "Give me your sandwich" video.
Published on Oct 13, 2012
Dinesh D'Souza & Michael Shermer in debate at Oregon State University. Questions from the student body regarding Universal Health Care / ObamaCare. The answers were quite well presented and the student body seemed to agree.

[JDPriestly]

1. The sandwich analogy does not work when compared to the needs of large numbers of people, such

as the need of millions of uninsured Americans for healthcare.

Why?

One of several assumptions underlying the sandwich example is that two people meet, one with a sandwich and one without. The problem is that in a society of hundreds of millions of people which is in addition severely divided in every respect by a vast disparity between the economic status of rich and poor, that assumption does not apply because the rich, those with the healthcare sandwiches and poor, those without the healthcare sandwiches do not meet.

There are a number of other assumptions in the give me your sandwich analogy that do not work. For one thing, it assumes that the person with the sandwich is not hungrier than the person without one. That is not always the case. The point of the ACA is not to deprive a person of a sandwich when he needs it but to give each at least a basic sandwich when needed.

The logical outcome in a society in which people rely on generous people handing out sandwiches and greedy people taking the sandwiches would be that the greedy would amass so many sandwiches that the sandwiches would rot while the generous would give away their sandwiches and have nothing to eat.

In a sense, that is the status quo that the ACA is intended to cure.

While upper class ladies get their noses fixed, their lids and chins lifted and their breasts enlarged, many poor women cannot afford to visit a general practitioner when they have lumps in their breasts and finally go when it is too late.

The sandwich analogy does not work. The upper class ladies getting cosmetic surgery never run across the poor farmworker who needs to go to a doctor about that lump in her breast.

Obamacare, the ACA, gives each the very basic, barebones healthcare she needs. If the upper class lady wants more, she can still buy it for herself.

The ACA concept has worked since the 1960s in Medicare. I know a self-described "wealthy" woman who waited to get certain expensive care until she qualified for Medicare. You have a suspicious bump in your breast, you go to the doctor.

Medical care for the poor should not be left up to the kindness of strangers the poor will never meet.

[Notafraidtoo]

2. All successful people

Stand on the backs and shoulders of millions of people before them, they got their sandwich not just because they may have worked hard but because 1000's of others who are not as successful as them worked hard to get them that sandwich.

Republicans live in a fantasy world where anyone can be successful completely ignoring that capitalism requires a huge pool of working poor for others to profit from, after all cant pay the stock guy or the burger flip a 100,000 a year now can we and we don't hire these people unless we profit from their labor which means we have to make more from them then what we pay them yet another thing republicans don't seem to understand.

If they could show me one country where even half of Americans would be OK living in that doesn't look after their poor, sick or elderly then maybe their arguments would be worth looking at, but the most successful country's i can find that practice republican economics is Mexico,Russia and Pakistan not exactly great places to live but Democrats have places like Australia,Germany,Britain and Finland.


Wonder how many Republicans would be OK with Russia's Economy, considering they practice Republican economics to a tee.

[ErikJ]

3. I guess D'Souza prefers India's system of no govt help for the poor

[Festivito]

4. Suppose A insured B would not go hungry, then refused to give, then Obama rolls up on a horse...

Points the gun of government backed judicial threat and he then B finally hands over the sandwich.

That would also be a different "moral content" of that transaction with outcome that A gets the sandwich.

The current situation in this country BEFORE Obamacare is that we all have defacto insurance: if we appear deathly ill at a hospital they MUST treat us. Who pays for that insurance? Up till now, everyone who had insurance would be charged higher prices on hospital care and the hospital would then take care of the non-able-to-pay persons they treated.

Under Obamacare, each person will now pay for that insurance themselves in the form of a non-compliance penalty added their taxes.

Person A paid for minimal insurance that he would not starve, and person A gets the sandwich.

[WhoIsNumberNone]

5. So as long as Paul is a billionaire, the right wingers are OK with it.

[passiveporcupine]

6. No, his analogy was not well presented, and the applauding audience was

probably right wingers and/or religious fundamentalists who would have agreed with anything he had to say. Yes we do have those in Oregon, unfortunately. I can't imagine a liberal wanting to attend one of his debates.

D'Souza is an embarrassment, even to his own party. He thinks the right wing should join up with radical Muslims and fight the liberal left who were, as he says, responsible for 9/11. He admitted to Colbert that he and Islamic militants share some of the same negative beliefs about liberal Americans.

Sorry, he's an extremist, a conspiracy theorist, and a nut job. Why this is even being posted on DU as a valid argument is beyond me.

His sandwich analogy is not valid because nobody is taking health care away from the wealthy to give it to the poor. They want it to be available to all, wealthy and poor.