Strange Bedfellows

I'm an internet addict. There, I said it. I spend a lot of time at the New York Times online website which is where, at five a.m. this morning, I found an op-ed piece by Nicholas D. Kristof called, "Let Congress Go Without Insurance."  Kristof suggests that, like the American population, eight percent of Congress should be stripped of their taxpayer-funded insurance benefits. (I personally think it should be 100% as a penalty for the complete uselessness they've exhibited in providing the American people with a workable health care system.)

Turns out that taking away their benefits wouldn't do much, as one commenter points out that the average Congressperson has a personal net worth of 1.2 million dollars. People with that kind of dosh can afford to take their chances on the open market, no? Of course, even with that kind of personal wealth, they'd better pray that they don't get cancer, which would bankrupt even the wealthiest of them under our current system, I think.

Not that it would make my bitter little heart glad to see that happen.

Another Harvard study released in May found that in 2007, 65% of personal bankruptcies had involved high medical bills. Most of those people had insurance. But even with insurance, their annual out-of-pocket medical bills averaged over $17,000. [. . . W]here would you rather get cancer? In America, you have a modestly better chance of surviving most cancers for 5 years. But there's a 1 in 4 chance you will lose your life savings and a 1 in 10 chance you will have to beg for food or rent, while in France, the whole thing will cost you nothing.

(That's from The Economist, by the way.)

Oh, and you know what else makes my bitter little heart glad?

Child rapist Roman Polanski was denied bail by Swiss courts. Turns out they think he's a flight risk. Huh. Wonder where they got that idea.

In fact, for days I had to stay off the major news sites because of that very child rapist. For all the days that his ugly rapist face dominated the headlines, I had to stay away because just looking at his ugly bloated face made me feel murderous. Reading about the way he and his supporters are trying play the victim card on behalf of a man who drugged and raped a thirteen-year-old girl made me feel murderous.

I made myself stop reading stories about it when I read a commenter, more hatefully bitter than I, suggest that it was a shame that Hitler hadn't managed to kill all the Polish Jews. (In case you don't know, the rapist's family were Polish Jews and many of them died in concentration camps.) I read that and my flinty little heart felt glad that someone was as poisoned by this whole matter as I have been. Oh, I'm getting to the point where I can read stories about it and I can even read comments from rape apologists about it, but I still can't look at his ugly, child rapist face without feeling hatred well up in me.

“If I had killed somebody, it wouldn’t have had so much appeal to the press, you see? But… fucking, you see, and the young girls. Judges want to fuck young girls. Juries want to fuck young girls. Everyone wants to fuck young girls!” --Roman Polanski

That quote was from an interview he gave a year after he pled guilty to the statutory rape charge (in exchange for having six related felony charges dropped) and fled the country to avoid sentencing.

I don't know what kind of person believes that this man doesn't deserve to face consequences for raping a child, but apparently those people are out there. Some of them are quite prominent. Among those who believe that child rapists should go free is, unsurprisingly, Woody Allen, who you may recall began a sexual relationship with the adopted, high-school-aged daughter of his lover, Mia Farrow. (Allen, incidentally, was accused of molesting his own seven-year-old biological daughter, though a judge found the evidence inconclusive based as it was on the star-struck, partially destroyed reports issued by the psychologists who tested the girl.)

So there it is: Health care and the treatment of child rapists. The internet makes for strange bedfellows.