Fairness

I considered calling this post "Conservatives want to spend more on illegal immigrants than liberals" but decided that was snark at the expense of accuracy. According to this article in the LA Times, a Congressional oversight committee has found that new regulations requiring stricter documentation checks to prove citizenship or legal status before qualifying for healthcare have actually cost $16.6 million. These new rules have caught 8 illegal aliens. So a little over $2 million spent to catch each one. But thank goodness we got those freeloaders out of the system! Surely that will save us tons of money!

This obsession with fairness, at this stage in the game (paying for healthcare, college, taxes) completely befuddles me. Now is when life is suddenly supposed to be fair? Where was all this concern about fairness when the topic was about poverty or institutional racism and sexism or all the big problems that get us to the point where people can't afford to pay for insurance or find jobs? Hell, Glenn Beck has been arguing that 'social justice' is a bad word! (ok, phrase)

Again, it all just strikes me as hateful and small-minded. Talking about level playing fields and justice in terms of access to opportunities is whining, but demanding fairness in the tax code and damning people who can't afford insurance to illness and death is the American way? Seriously? We're the Greatest Nation (TM) and we're willing to sacrifice hardworking citizens just to make sure that not a single person freeloads? And who are we to even decide that any person is a freeloader? We don't know their story. We don't know what drove them to this place. Or what similar set of circumstances might find us, or someone we cared about, in a similar place.

How is it patriotic to consider our resources so meager, our neighborliness so lacking, our charity so tight-fisted, that we're willing to spend millions of dollars just to make sure someone doesn't have access to a doctor that they didn't pay for?