Some people look up, see the piano falling on them and move. Some people are "persons of faith", never look up and are duly killed, aka kool-aid drinkers. The worst, though, are those who look up, see the piano falling, but recede into a suicidal state of denial, aka politicals. Seems most of my arguments these days are with people in the third group. Unfortunately for them, Nature makes the final call.
Finally, I've come across someone (from MSNBC no less) who hits the nail right on the head.
Health insurance and health care are two different things.
America's politicians, White House speechwriters, and way too much of the news media should be forced to write the above sentence 1,000 times.
In the immortal words of John McClane: "No fucking shit!" While the useful idiots debate this and that in the trenches, the puppet masters are free to see things as they really are. Healthcare costs are outrageous and out of control. There's a simple solution in real life: remove the greed from the system. But no one is going to retain political power in a country whose faith in greed is unparalleled and unquestioned. In fact, there can't even be a conversation about it.
So what to do about it? It's like having a cancer patient being brought in but the option of removing the tumor cannot be part of the answer. But if the patient dies it will still be all your fault! The answer then is to find a hapless victim, hook them up to a blood transfusion with the cancer patient, and thus extend life that way. Oh sure, you end up with two dead bodies instead of one in the end but you simply tell the kool-ad drinkers and politicals that it was "unforeseeable."
That's exactly what we have with the ACA. Draining the pocketbooks of tens of millions to support the unsustainable built-in greed of the system in order to push out the inevitable date of death. Those whose blood are taken say, "See? I'm useful!" (Moses warned the Hebrews to grow up or they'd sell themselves back into slavery.) Those who cut the cord holding the piano (because they want to share the wealth with as few as possible) laugh at so many morons willing to let their lives slip away to support a corrupt system.
"Oh shit! I gave my life for what??"
We all give our lives for something, for better or worse.
Just as there are many who draw moral self-worth from demonizing marijuana, there are many who draw moral credence from supporting the ACA. These "people of faith" take pleasure in the perversion of their religion's tenet that "health insurance equals health care." I say, God damn those people.
Because they just don't seem to understand that getting millions more Americans signed onto to some kind of health insurance is absolutely nothing to be proud of unless those people actually get better and affordable care. And there's also nothing to celebrate about Obamacare if there's been no easing of the burden for emergency rooms where we have cared for so many uninsured people at such a high cost for so long.
So far it looks like the ACA is 0 for 2. It's already been well documented that the Obamacare plans are leaving millions of Americans struggling to find doctors who actually accept their new insurance plans. And now it turns out America's emergency rooms aren't getting a break either. A just-released poll by the American College of Emergency Physicians, shows that 75% of the 2,099 ER doctors it surveyed are seeing either a major surge or at least a slight increase in the volume of patients coming into their emergency departments. Again, not only are the ER's not seeing any easing of traffic but their burden to care for those unable to find accessible health care has increased in the past year. So much for all those millions of Americans who were supposed to have great new choices and great new access to care.
Silly girl. Corporate greed serves the human need! Right??
But facts mean so little in politics (which is why most people wallow in and subscribe to politics) and once one views oneself as Jesus-not-to-be-questioned then whatever is done to get or retain political power automatically becomes a saintly endeavor. And God knows our last two Presidents have a messiah complex justifying acts of treachery "for the greater good."
But the real tip off was when we learned that so many people signing up for Obamacare were being shoved into Medicaid, a system that has been struggling for years to find enough doctors to accept its ridiculously low reimbursement structure. And since Obamacare doesn't do anything to encourage more young people to go into medicine, there was the simple math problem of too many patients and not enough doctors to treat them. You can have all the nice laminated insurance cards you can carry, but they aren't worth a thing if you can't find a doctor who can treat you.
All of this would be bad enough if implementing Obamacare came for free. But the costs of the ACA are exorbitant and already at least $250 billion more than President Obama promised when he signed it into law in 2010.
When I hear someone say, "But look what Obummercare did for me!" it's like hearing a 1 percenter say, "But look what tax cuts did for me!" No thought to the overall destructive nature of the beast nor of the looming disaster in the making. "I got mine, fuck everything else." One day, mon ami, you're going to find you're part of "everything else".
I come not to condemn Caesar but to bury him. There is a solution. Who can we blame for not choosing it?
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