Monday, April 3, 2017

Week of 04/03/2017



GOP Healthcare Solution Was Unborn To Fail
Trumpcare, Ryancare, American Healthcare Act, Don’tcare, Dropdeadcare...
Whatever you want to call the GOP’s version of healthcare “reform” of the “reform” that they never wanted in the first place, it was a disaster.
If you think about it, the whole premise was filled with hypocrisy.  This is a party that claims to be “pro-life”, and yet they openly and hastily aborted their own political baby instead of letting it come to term and fail in a vote in the House of Representatives.  And in the third trimester, no less!  You GOPers make the late Doctor George Tiller look like a lightweight in comparison!
I cannot help but laugh at the utter hypocrisy and absolute fail of the GOP.  It reminds me of the old Loony Toons cartoon when Wiley Coyote finally... and it was the only time he ever did it... caught the Road Runner, but, because of the mechanizations of the chase that took him through a series of ever-shrinking pipes, he ended up being six inches tall.  So once he had his hands around the Road Runner’s leg, he held up a sign that says “Okay, I finally caught him.  Now what?”
This is the political party that spent eight long years fighting any idea of healthcare reform, vowing to repeal President Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act at the earliest opportunity, trying sixty times to repeal it, that threatened to shut down the whole country if they couldn’t get what they wanted, that made it their campaign promise year after year after year to undo Obama’s actions, and when they finally get free reign to do it, they can’t.  Performance issues.  Talk about “low energy” and having “small hands”!  I guess they needed to take that little “blue” pill to help them with their political erection problems, but then they realized that blue is the color of Democrats.
And now, of course, that their “fix” is a flop, they’re scrambling over who to blame and what to do now.  The conservatives want to blame this on House Speaker Paul Ryan.  After all, it’s “his” boat that sank.  Except Ryan was never about repealing the ACA.  He didn’t even want people to think of the bill as “Ryancare”.  His thing was about crafting theoretical budgets that never could get passed.  He was “Mister Budget”, not “Mister Healthcare”.  That title went to the man who is currently the Health and Human Services Secretary, Tom Price.  Price was the guy with the supposed “plan”.
The orange-skinned-wacky-man in the White House, President Donald Trump, wants the ultra-conservative and neo-conservative “Freedom Caucus” to take the blame for this.  After all, they refused to go along with the bill, which forced the late-term political abortion on March 24th.  Some people think that this is sheer lunacy, because Trump is essentially attacking the very base that put him in the White House.  However, if you know anything about narcissists, then you’d know that this is a normal reaction for someone like Trump.  Narcissists instinctively attack anyone that makes him look bad, and that includes attacking friends and allies.
But, in truth, the so-called “Tea Party” people are only guilty of following their own rules.  They knew what they wanted.  The GOP knew what the Tea Party people wanted… hell, they made the “Tea Party” people after their 2008 failure!  Trump himself knew exactly what he was getting in bed with when he started campaigning to them last year!  Well, at least Trump has an excuse… he is, after all, a narcissist.
Trump even tried to blame this on the Democrats and their inept Congressional leadership of incompetent Nancy Pelosi and milquetoast Chuck Shummer.  Why?  Because they were “supposed” to help him get this passed!  No, I’m not making this up.
Let’s see… you berate and badmouth the Democrats, your hatchet men deride the Dems at every opportunity, your GOP friends in Congress cheat like Ted Cruz to shove your cabinet nominees through confirmations, and you still expect the Dems to turn around and help you get a bill passed that would undo everything they set up?  I would say that takes an extra-special kind of stupid to expect that kind of battered spouse response, but then again this is President Donald Trump we are talking about.
But in truth, if you really want to know who to blame for the GOP’s political erectile dysfunction on healthcare, it has to be Trump.
First of all, Trump set a condition that the GOP never wanted put in.  Trump expected the GOP to repeal-and-replace the ACA.  And contrary to his narcissistic denials afterward, he continually said prior to the March 24th abortion that he expected the GOP to put a bill on his desk from day one to repeal-and-replace Obamacare.  Google it if you don’t believe me.  There are numerous videos of him saying it at different times.  Repeal *and* replace!
But here’s the problem: the GOP never wanted “repeal-and-replace”.  Ever.  They only know one thing, and that is repeal.  That is all that they ever wanted.  They wanted just to repeal the Affordable Care Act.  Not replace it.  Not fix it.  Not substitute it with another idea of their own creation.  No.  They wanted the whole thing repealed, period, end of story, drop mic.
The only time anyone in the GOP would come up with an alternative to the Affordable Care Act would be if they were pressured to do it, and that is where then-Congressman Price would come in.  But the rest of the GOP was united under the political porn fantasy of repealing Obamacare in its entirety.  That is why the Tea Party faction did not support the GOP’s aborted baby, because it was still something that they never signed on for.
The second mistake Trump made was to force a deadline on Congress.  Never mind the delusional expectation that they would have this “repeal-and-replace” bill on his desk from day one, Trump forced the March 24th deadline itself, telling them to either pass it or move on.
Silly little small-handed narcissist!  Don’t you know that Congress is the opposite of progress?  They don’t move faster just because *you* told them to!  Congress is not DC Trump Incorporated.  They are not your employees.  It took a year-and-a-half for Obama to get his healthcare reform passed and put on his desk, and under far better political conditions than you have now, and that was with the media on his side!  And you expected the GOP to do your bidding in sixty days?  No, sir, that twitter-dropping fail falls squarely on top of your coiffed hair.
Like it or not – and I don’t give a crap either way - this aborted reform plan *is* Trumpcare!  Trump wanted it, he campaigned for it, he demanded it be passed and put on his desk for his signature, so this *is* his!  Accept it!  Own it!  It is yours, sir!
But even with all of this political ineptitude, with all of the complexities of Trumpcare exposed, it would still have been a huge colossal failure if it did get passed, because it makes the same mistakes as Obamacare.
Let’s get brutally honest here… neither Trump’s reform or Obama’s ever really dealt with the real issue behind the healthcare problem, and that is the problem of corporate greed.  Greed on behalf of greedy pharma companies, greedy insurance companies, and greedy hospitals that treat human beings as walking wallets that they can pilfer at every opportunity.
The Affordable Care Act’s solution to the greed was to force everyone to pay for the greed whether they wanted to or not, and then subsidize some of the costs for people that would otherwise not afford it.  It did not address the problem of greed, and it did not stop the three greedy sides of healthcare from either jacking up their costs even further or else slashing coverage.  That’s why the ACA is failing the American people.  There is no mechanism to stop the greed.
And that’s from a program that tries to help human beings instead of helping soulless amoral corporations.  Care to fancy a guess what Trumpcare would do?  At best you would’ve been given a tax credit instead of a subsidy.  Now if you can’t afford to pay for a program without help, how can you expect to pay for it with a tax credit that wouldn’t be issued until after the purchase is made that you cannot afford?  Well we all know what the answer to that would be.  You don’t pay for it.  Instead you get sadistic comments like those of Utah’s disgraceful Congressman Jason Chaffetz, who told struggling people that they should choose between healthcare and an iPhone.
But, hey, what can you expect from a party of sadistic sociopaths that cannot tell the difference between healthcare and wealthcare?
Sadly, there is only one way to negate the unchecked greed in healthcare, and that is to treat the whole industry as a public service like police and fire departments.  As a practical libertarian, I would recognize that as a necessary evil just like the need of police and fire services.  I may not like it, but I would recognize the premise.  And, of course, the party of sociopaths and the party of career failure would never really go along with that idea.  Those Pennsylvania Avenue prostitutes get paid big campaign money from those aforementioned greedy entities to do their bidding, not the bidding of the actual voters.  To them, it really is about wealthcare, not healthcare.
Of course the GOP-controlled government still can do everything they can to undermine the Affordable Care Act.  They have been hammering in the script that the ACA is a failure, and there is nothing that would stop them from making it happen.  Or they can do nothing and continue to let their greedy corporate friends screw over the American people and let the ACA fail on its own.  Trump himself has even speculated that as a probable outcome, clearing the way for Trumpcare 2.0.
Regardless of the events to come, as long as we fail to recognize and address the problem of corporate greed, any proposed healthcare reform program will be destined to fail, no matter who champions it.  Intentions don’t heal the sick and injured.  And if you can’t tell the difference between healthcare and wealthcare, then even the best of intentions are not only meaningless, they are downright sadistic.

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