2020 presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders relaunches his Medicare-for-all health care

[ehrnst]

44. "You never answered my question as to WHY *they* like it?"

You didn't ask why I "think" they like it. You want me to speculate something about the opinions of people who were polled, so you can jump on it as "justifying and defending their liking of the blood money hungry insurance companies..."

And I shot it down.

I didn't evade your metaphor, I shot it down.

Good one. But here's the metaphor with the point emphasized. It was not comparing the NFL to football at all. Stay with me - It was comparing two ways of convincing people of the existence of a problem they don't see, that one also happens to think is a moral problem, non-confrontationally with FACTS, instead of strident pontificating about how they are cluelessly participating in something that is deeply immoral. Let's take this slowly.

I feel the same way about the NFL that you do about health insurance companies.

I didn't say that the NFL is like health insurance at all. I'm saying that you and I have a similar moral beef with an entity that has profit motives to promote their product to high school parents to create future consumers. This profit motive also leads them to hide the hazards to their employees that could also affect high school participants. I think that this is a moral hazard. Like you, this moral hazard make me angry and leads me to act to address the potential damage to the kids at the high school.

You still with me?

There are a few ways that I could do this.

I don't expect anyone to take me seriously if I stood up at my son's high school and said "Filthy lucre made by the NFL is not "profit," so much as blood money. We need to banish football from our team sports, because it feeds their fandom, and their BLOOD MONEY!!!!!!!"
OR
I would say, "Here are the stats on repetitive head injuries sustained in sports such as Football on future brain function, from non-partisan medical studies."

Now, get ready for it - the FIRST POINT of the metaphor......

Now, it would certainly be satisfying if they all got up behind me in scenario #1 like soldiers behind William Wallace and screamed that they hated the NFL, and they would not participate in the NFL marketing by continuing to have a football team. However, that's not a likely occurance. You may think that anyone who doesn't hate the NFL after someone pointificated on how immoral they were to have not thought of it as harmful is just not "getting it." I, on the other hand, would be surprised if many were actually converted after being yelled at. You see universal health as being = to punishing private health insurance companies, because your hate for them is tied in with your anger at so many not having health care. It seems to be a case of, "my rage at the health care situation in this country is validated by the numbers, so my moral outrage at the very existence of private insurance is equally validated.

The difference between you and me, is that if there was a helmet developed that could actually prevent that damage, and it was put into use in the NFL and in high schools, that would be the end of my objection to the NFL on head injury neglect. YES, they should be held accountable financially and otherwise for the years that they knew about head injury and purposefully hid it from public. But if they reform, there isn't any reason to keep penalizing them, or make football illegal on the basis that it contributes to traumatic brain injury by for profit.

I may think that the entity is immoral for the harm that is being done. However, if my primary goal is to eliminate the traumatic brain injury in both the players in the NFL, and the players in high school who idolize NFL players, and there is a solution (such as a helmet, or changing the game) that would do that, but didn't end the NFL and validate my anger towards them, that would be acceptable to me.

The second point in the metaphor is - you seem to require vengance to an entity in addition to a solution to the problem, and no solution that would actually fix the problem faster, and for more people, that doesn't impose that vengance is unacceptable to you.