When my respect runs out - Final Draft

I was raised under the belief that each person has the right to their own opinions. I may not always agree with what other people think, but I always respect their opinions. I have never liked Sarah Palin, but I have done my best to respect her personal views. This ended recently, as I learned more information about her views on health care reform.

It is understandable that people who have no experience with socialized medicine would be skeptical about making changes to our current health care system. Most people in the United States have had little or no contact with socialized medicine, but one person who has is Sarah Palin. While speaking to an audience in Calgary last week, Palin admitted that her family used to take advantage of Canadian healthcare instead of using medical facilities near their home in Alaska.

I don’t understand how someone whose family used socialized medicine by choice could label all forms of socialized health care as evil. Palin’s family obviously must have thought that Canadian health care was less evil than the health care offered to them in Alaska. There must have been some major flaws in the health care they were receiving in Alaska if they decided to dash across the border for different care.

I would be hard pressed to view a system as evil if my family had benefited from it in many ways. Palin has never backed down from her stance that socialized medicine, and anything else that has the word socialized in front of it, is the worst possible choice for America. I guess I think that the worst possible choice for America is letting many of its citizens live without health insurance, praying that they don’t get sick. Of course, this wouldn’t matter to someone like Palin, who has enough money to pay for any medical procedure that she or any other member of her family might need.

One person that Palin would not have to pay for is her grandson Tripp. Tripp is covered by the Indian Health Service because he is the descendant of the Yup'ik Eskimo people. The IHS is a form of government-run health care, which is exactly what Palin is so strongly in opposition to. It is strange to think that she would allow her own grandson to rely on this health care plan when she certainly has enough money to buy high priced insurance for him.

Maybe I shouldn’t be so bothered by these two facts when looking at Sarah Palin’s views on health care reform, but I think that I have a right to be upset. It is one thing to be in opposition to something that you believe is wrong, but it is another to oppose something that you have personally benefited from, and that your family is currently using. The fact that these two pieces of information were uncovered months after Palin started ranting about health care reform is also interesting. Why not tell us upfront about your history with the system, and explain why you think it’s wrong? Oh, I forgot, politicians don’t like to tell the truth until they are backed into a corner.

I will still stand by the values that my parents raised me with, and continue to respect the opinions of others. However, I will no longer listen to people like Sarah Palin, who tell me that what I believe is wrong because they know better, when they are in fact being hypocritical. Sarah Palin can scream from the mountaintops about her views on health care, but I am no longer listening. Not that I was really listening very carefully anyway.