Stay with me here. This came to me while I was in a car repair shop waiting room that, unfortunately, had Fox on their tv. After the piece on "angry average Americans" who are "furious that their America is being destroyed by government healthcare" (unlike, say, government sponsored torture or unnecesary war--but I digress), there was a commercial for some "as seen on TV" mop or broom or something, who really knows. I was an invention. That made someone money. It may have been stupid and needless, but someone worked hard on it and patented it and got an informercial made about it.
So as I found myself wondering how someone comes up with this sort of idea, I kept returning to whether they had health insurance. And it got me thinking about how lack of access to health insurance could really stifle the entreprenurial spirit of America. Did this person have a spouse with a job that had healthcare, so they could quit their job and work on this? Did they work at their job during the day, and stay up all night tinkering with their invention, just so they could keep their health insurance? Or did they go without health insurance, hoping nothing would go wrong until they maybe, possibly hit it big with this incredible new item for American households?
What this finally led me to is how many other ideas, innovations, inventions, etc. are going unmade, unfulfilled, unrealized, all because someone does not have the courage (foolhardiness) to leave their health care-providing job? Private insurance would wipe them out, and they need what little they have saved to put towards the creation of their dream. Isn't America all about this sort of forward movement? We are the folks who come up with all the good ideas (although usually some other country perfects it and makes it cheaper), but lack of easy to get, affordable health care could be stifling this. And how un-American of Republicans.