It’s not just job loss. What if you want to start your own business? I did, and neither I nor my business partner would have taken a chance on that without the ACA’s guarantee that you can buy health insurance even if you’re a middle-aged guy with some of the typical pre-existing conditions associated with that demo.
If that protection ceases, we’ll close the business and return to big firms. We currently have nine people working full-time, with a nice sales funnel ahead of us.
That’s a great point, about entrepreneurship and small businesses. It’s almost as if corporate America doesn’t want skilled people developing economic independence, and breaking free from being a captive resource. Hmm…
The Onion’s AV Club published an actual, not-satire retraction that nonetheless is one of the best and most Onion-y things they’ve done in a while:
Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.
I will add, that the Dems singing Goodby was incredibly taste at a time when many of their constituents are suffering.
He golfs literally every damn weekend.
Hey did any of our resident craven shitlords feel sufficiently emboldened to cheer on their team for legislating me out of my children’s lives yet?
Well I mean on the plus side the taxes of people they’ve never met will go down.
Oh, they haven’t?
Well, thank goodness they still have their guns. What a shame it would be if the government came after something of theirs that fucking mattered.
I wonder if he golfs more as President than he did while campaigning… (putting aside that we are looking at the BEGINNING of his term)
I’d be thrilled if he did nothing but golf, every day of the week. The less time he spends doing his job, the better for everyone.
I think they remember what the GOP did after Clinton’s tax bill passed by one vote.
It also is so protected by pretty much every single democratic, developed country but the US. Of course it’s hard for me to be objective, since we have it enshrined in our constitution in the same way you have freedom of speech up there.
It baffles me that it is not a right in the US, but the US is pretty idiosyncratic as far as developed democracies go (death penalty being another weird holdout that no other equivalent country still practices). I suspect it has to do with the radical protestant origins of the country (the non-Catholic Judeo-Christian heritage you speak of. Countries of Catholic origin have a very different set of principles, in my experience, some good, some bad).
I don’t buy that if something constitutes a right the government is only supposed to provide the minimum viable alternative for it. Of course budgets are limited and you can’t offer everything, so claims (as opposed to privileges) are always going to be limited by the realities of budget and there will need to be priorities on how to apply it, but if we construe health care as a right at all (and I think you do, based on your post) then I think it’s the duty of the government to make right of that right the best they can. And yes, that might imply higher taxes.
There’s also a very practical reason to provide more than just life saving healthcare to everybody. It saves money in the long run. If you have a healthier population, you spend far less in treating conditions that are detected before they develop into expensive to treat or chronic issues. A huge part of how public healthcare systems work is about keeping the general population healthy through preventive care. It might be more expensive to provide just life saving healthcare (which happens to be the most expensive) and not preventive care. And that’s without getting into what is life saving healthcare at all and how you define it. It’s super expensive chemo life saving? Or are you just talking about immediate ER stuff? I just don’t see how the line can even begin to be drawn.
Finally, as a tangent: one of your arguments is that public healthcare stops being practical once you reach a certain population threshold/complexity in a society. But I could argue the opposite, that relying on individual action and freedom to compensate for an ineffective government that doesn’t have the budget (due to too low taxes and economic policy/ideology getting in the way) breaks mightily under a big population. While individuals and charities have the ability to provide such services in small and medium sized societies, where the separation of social strata is moderate geographically and humanly, once your sectors in need do not constitute just buildings or neighborhoods but basically cities, the model breaks apart due to both logistics (charities and individual actions don’t scale as well as government action) and human reason (people who ought to give are much less in contact with people that need to be given). Again, every developed country can provide much cheaper healthcare than the US, and effectively. Some of those countries have populations that, while certainly not on the size of the US, are big enough for size to be the explanation for the difference in effectiveness.
Well, I’m slightly less disappointed with Amash than earlier in the week. He posted a lengthy explanation to his Facebook page late last night. As expected, his bottom line is the federalist argument that healthcare needs to be removed entirely at the national level and left to the states. He also seems to think that the fact that states have to jump through a few hoops in order to push people with pre-existing conditions into high-risk pools makes it OK. But I expected those stances - what had disappointed me was his voting for a bill that was pushed through in a rushed processes. On that point, he says:
[quote]Many have questioned the process that led up to the vote on May 4. I have publicly expressed my disgust with it. The House again operated in top-down fashion rather than as a deliberative body that respects the diversity of its membership. But it’s important to acknowledge that the bulk of this bill (123 pages) was released on March 6. Only about 15 pages were added after late March. Members of Congress were given sufficient time to read and understand the entire bill.
While an earlier version of the AHCA included a CBO score, the types of changes made to the AHCA in more recent stages render an updated score highly speculative and practically meaningless. For that score to be useful, the Congressional Budget Office would have to effectively predict which states will seek waivers, which waivers they will seek, and when they will seek them. This complex analysis of the political processes and choices of every state is beyond anyone’s capability. I weighed the lack of an updated score accordingly.[/quote]
I’d still rather have seen opposition from him on the basis of process, but I can at least see his points here.
Short version: “Prediction is hard, and it’s impossible to know what the effects of the new parts of the bill are. So I went ahead and voted for it anyway … Why yes, I do describe myself as a conservative. Why do you keep waving that dictionary in my face?”
He has no points. If a Democrat had done that he’d be all over them about the lack of cost information. This goes to show you the GOP and so-called conservatives only care about being efficient and cost conscious when the other side is at the helm. As soon as they have it, they do whatever they hell they want without the slightest consideration to their once screamed values.
Amash isn’t really a conservative as much as a hard core libertarian. To the extent that even I, who beat his libertarian views, find him extreme. He’s far too dogmatic.
I wonder how many hardcore libertarians plan to turn down medicare when they hit 65?
Since the government is stealing their money to fund it, they’d probably say they’re entitled.
Broke my oath to not use the “like” button for this post. Thanks for laying it out like that. Sums up my own thinking very well.
Also, thank you, Strollen. I’ve really enjoyed reading your recent posts as well. Very well written and very helpful to me in understanding and thinking about alternative perspectives.
I completely agree this is the kind of conversation we need to be having on the national stage at a much deeper level. This stuff is hard. This stuff is important. It can’t be driven by bumper stickers if we as a society, and a people, hope to survive.
The last honest man at Fox beats up Pribus over Trump care.
https://www.rawstory.com/2017/05/older-people-are-going-to-be-paying-five-times-more-foxs-chris-wallace-smacks-down-priebus-on-trumpcare/
My favorite thing of late is seeing Trump supporters who like and comment on these various Facebook pages for kids born with various health issues. Cause they care about the kids… but not really, their parents should have to beg strangers for money so their kid doesn’t die.
I assume it’s the “Christian” thing where you don’t help the needy because then who would you have to pity and give time and money to prove to God (and everyone who will listen) how awesome you are?
“We could help thousands.”
“But then I can’t show everyone how great I am when I help out a dozen!”
“You’re right, we should let them die save for a few we keep around to prove how righteous we are.”