The problems with our country's political discourse are many and grave, but an insufficient attention to Obamacare isn't among them. We have talked Obamacare to death, or at least into home hospice care. The "Obamacare " shorthand itself reflects our need to come up with less of a mouthful than "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, " given how regularly the topic recurs. "Obamacare"" is like "J. Lo"" or "KFC." " It saves syllables and speeds things along.
So explain this: according to a recent poll, roughly 40 percent of Americans don't even know that it's a law on the books. Now if I learned that 40 percent weren't aware of when Obamacare was to be fully implemented or whether any of it had yet gone into practice or precisely how it's likely to affect them, I wouldn't be surprised or distressed. Obamacare is nothing if not unwieldy and opaque: "Ulysses " meets "Mulholland Drive. " The people confused about it include no small number of the physicians I know and probably a few of the law's authors to boot. But 40 percent of Americans are clueless about its sheer existence. Some think it's been repealed by Congress. Some think it's been overturned by the Supreme Court. A few probably think it's been vaporized and replaced with a galactic edict beamed down from one of Saturn's moons. With Americans you never know. According to a survey I stumbled across just weeks ago, 21 percent believe that a U.F.O. landed in Roswell, N.M., nearly seven decades ago and that the federal government hushed it up, while 14 percent believe in Bigfoot.
According to another survey, taken last year, about 65 percent of us can't name a single Supreme Court justice. Not the chief one, John Roberts. Not the mute one, Clarence Thomas. Not even the mean one, Antonin Scalia. Though when it comes to Scalia, perhaps the body politic suffers less from ignorance than from repressed memory. That we Americans are out to lunch isn't news.
Abortion has been an issue that has bothered me, ever since I moved to Texas. Texas being a conservative and pro-life have voiced out against the feticide and attacked abortion clinic and doctors. A friend of mine underwent an illegal abortion from fear of being kicked out of her church and family. ...