All in DMN
Most Americans believe everyone ought to be able to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. That’s the ideal we imagined, at least: If everyone would work harder or be smarter, they could achieve the American dream. Here’s the problem with that logic: Not everyone has working bootstraps to pull up.
This is the trickle-down moral economics of American policy today. It's harder and harder to know who are the good players and who are the bad players and who are the opportunistic players. It's possible some are all three at the same time.
We suffer today from new forms of scriptural and cultural proof-texting that should remind us of the need for good principles of interpretation all around: Always consider events in the broader sweep and stop taking single events out of context to prove what you want to believe.
We've got more information, more data, more facts, more research available to us today on every subject imaginable than ever before. Most of us are not lacking in access to information. What we lack is willingness to consider all the available information and to think critically about that information.
Access to quality health care really is the difference between life and death — and the difference between the kind of life you want to keep living and the kind of life you don't. At any step along the way, my outcome could have been dramatically worse if I had been denied access to the right providers at the right time.
