Hey now, his seat was paid for through 2018 by the insurance and healthcare industries! Kicking him out of a paid-for seat like that is something you’d only see in corporate America!
He is an example of a California republican who has a district laid out for him. I guess in the Dems gerrymandering the state they had to toss a few bones to the GOP and Nunes got one of them. :)
Central California (except for the actual city of Fresno) tends to go conservative. Ag region.
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The military member isn’t “paying into” their health plan beyond the taxes we all pay. There is no monthly payment. There’s no deductible. There’s no “pre-existing conditions.” You serve, you’re covered 100%. So is your spouse and kids.
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A military employee complaining about ACA is different because as long as they’re in the military, they’re not losing their 100% “free” medical coverage. They’re free to gripe about taxes certainly, but shitting on non-military people for their healthcare, while enjoying their 100% taxpayer funded healthcare is the height of “fuck you, I got mine.”
But how does that differ from someone working for a private employer who gets coverage included as a benefit? They both signed on knowing what was in their benefit packages. You could say the guy in the military gets underpaid and thus deserves the health care more.
Don’t get me wrong though. It is douchie for anyone to bitch about anyone else’s position in life.
From everything I know of Amash, I’m confident that Onion article is completely accurate! He loves nothing better than to vote for things that reduce size of federal government.
[quote=“Scuzz, post:328, topic:129070”]
But how does that differ from someone working for a private employer who gets coverage included as a benefit? They both signed on knowing what was in their benefit packages.[/quote]
I guess I don’t understand what you’re driving at. My issue is that since everyone’s tax money is paying for the soldier’s comprehensive healthcare, that service member has no standing to complain about those same taxpayers’ half-assed civilian coverage. Whether it’s the ACA, or AHCA, single-payer, or nothing, the soldier isn’t losing their medical care. Meanwhile, everyone that’s not a service member could get screwed.
If some civilian in Minnesota gripes about ACA because their premiums got too high, then that’s a starting point for a debate. I can at least understand that in their mind the ACA impacted them. When a soldier gripes, I just think that service member is being an ass.
The distinction there is that the taxpayers (collectively) hired the soldier to do a particular job. The soldier and the country both signed on to an agreement that the soldier would do X job for $Y salary and Z benefits (including healthcare). The health care is explicitly part of the compensation for services performed.
That same contractual employment relationship does not exist between the government and everybody else, so it’s internally consistent for the soldier to believe that the government shouldn’t be providing health care benefits to the rest of the populace. I would argue that they’re wrong, but not hypocritical.
I said that soldier is an ass and is the epitome of “fuck you, I got mine” and I stand by that. Whether that’s thanks to a military contract or by being rich enough to not care about everyone else’s healthcare, it’s still a shit attitude to have.
100% agree with this. I just think it’s equally shitty for a soldier to say that as it is for someone who gets coverage through their (private) employer. It doesn’t become double-plus-shitty just because their employer happens to be the government.
and we do- the GI Bill got me into a good situation.
The VA Loan is also there as well, and in an emergency if we’re broke, there is the VA for Healthcare.
Even for us 4 year folks whose main contribution was forecasting partly cloudy with a chance of storms each day.
IMO, the root problem with the health care crisis in this country is that we, as a society, have collectively viewed health care as simply another commodity, and we believe that the proper way to control the distribution of commodities is via the market. Most opposition to universal health care coverage of whatever sort, if it’s opposition that is at all thoughtful, stems from this premise. I disagree with that premise, but it is, at least, somewhat logical given the acceptance of capitalist, market norms.
Other developed nations do not believe health care is a commodity indistinguishable from, say, microwave ovens or televisions. Even the our capitalist trading partners separate health care into a different category, while still maintaining a private health care sector alongside the public one, generally.
What torques me when we talk about this issue in the USA are those people who have, as Teletrog pithily puts it, the “fuck you, I got mine” mentality. It’s pure Social Darwinism at its worst. Military, civilian, traveling circus clown, doesn’t matter in this respect. People who care nothing for anyone else and create a mythology of self-reliance to justify their beliefs are not helpful to society at large, to put it mildly.
At this point it’s going to take a mass uprising, preferably but not necessarily through the ballot box to solve this- the millenials are going to have to reject the philosophy we all grew up with.
There might be some hope for this. My students, all millennials of some sort, are pretty much baffled with our health care system. They certainly could lead the charge if they can get off Snapchat long enough.
What part of the country are you in? The millenials I worked with the AF were all overwhelming conservative.
Gotta scare them and make them think the current regime is a threat to their lives. It’s what worked for the Republicans.
I’m in Vermont, which, admittedly, is not the US norm. But, on the other hand, my school is a professionally-focused college, not a liberal arts school, either, so, eh, I have no idea what’s up.
It is certainly true that attitude seems to be pretty common among members of the Alt-right, but it is not at all representative of Americans. Virtually every study shows Americans to either the first or second most generous country in the world, modestly more so than other English speaking countries and significantly more so than most other countries. Within America red states are more generous than blues state, as this Huff Post article says.
So I don’t buy the Americans are selfish argument at all, nor are Republicans.
I won’t reiterate all the problems I have with the Obamacare. But there many explanation for Republican wanting to repeal Obamacare, beside them being heartless SOBs.
As I noted, there are rational arguments for and against the ACA. For me, none of the ones against it have been convincing. As suboptimal as the ACA is, I have yet to see any other proposals that are better, at least, in terms of proposals that have a snowball’s chance in hell of being passed.