Wordless Wednesday
Here’s What Obamacare Actually Does For You
“Wow! It is without any doubt the law now,” my friend Nola Guay crowed. “And there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in it that I don’t like!”
Two days from our celebration of Independence from a monarchy, how about the facts that it is yet another tax, that it will continue to drive up the cost of seeing your doctor, and that the Regent of Pennsylvania Avenue just stole yet another piece of your heritage?
But Mr. Obama says he gave you something good!
She sent me a poster of the Obamacare Top 10.
(1) “Access to health insurance for 30 million Americans …”
Every one of the 46 million Americans without health insurance had “access” to it before Obamacare came to be. Access has never been the problem.
“and lower premiums.”
Your insurance premiums have doubled in the last 10 years. They’ve continued to go up because many Obamacare provisions don’t take effect until after the election or 2014.
The problem isn’t higher premiums. The problem is the high cost of our medical system. Work on cost and I guarantee premiums can come down.
(2) “The ability of business and individuals to purchase comprehensive coverage from a regulated marketplace.”
Wow. I guess the Banking and Insurance industry wasn’t already regulated. Now it will be more regulated. Like Cable TV is. That’s gonna make it better.
(3) “Insurers’ [sic] cannot discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions.”
Um, anybody remember ERISA? Been there, done that.
(4) “Tax credits for small businesses that offer insurance.”
Oh, goody. We’ll raise taxes on all the rich small businessmen and businesswomen to come up with the money to give them tax credits back.
(5) “Assistance for businesses that provide health benefits to early retirees.”
See above. And don’t forget that “early retirees” doesn’t mean thee and me. It means the United Auto Workers who get to retire with full benefits and the GM stock Mr. Obama stole from the other retirees like thee and me who used to own that company.
(6) “Affordable health care for lower-income Americans. Obamacare extends Medicaid to individuals with incomes up to 138% of the federal poverty line.”
No new taxes, though. This won’t hurt a bit. You might feel a little pinch…
(7) “Investments in women’s health. Obamacare prohibits insurers from charging women substantially more than men …”
Oh, goody again. So Obamacare singlehandedly disallows the actuarial tables insurers live by. Or men, who cannot have children, get to pay a higher premium than they would under actuarial calculations. And old peeps. And children. All higher premiums.
(8) “Young adults’ ability to stay on their parents’ health care plans.”
That’s a good one. Didn’t need 2,700 pages to do that. Speaker of the House John Boehner mentioned yesterday that the insurance companies themselves lobbied for it because federal law kept them from allowing dependents to stay, well, dependent past their high school or college years.
See, young adults are generally healthier than older adults. That should improve the revenue the insurance plans generate.
(9) “Discounts for seniors on brand-name drugs.”
Oh, swell. The home of the $6,000 hammer will negotiate the cost of your Viagra.
Wait. That’s not right. Don’t the drugs we want fall into the “donut hole”? (That’s the difference between the initial coverage limit and the catastrophic coverage threshold currently in the Medicare Part D prescription drug program. This Administration loves donuts. One box of Munchkins coming up for your med-surg snack. Mmmm, donuts.)
(10) “Coverage for the sickest Americans.”
Bwahahahahahahahahah hah ha. And ha.
My friend Rufus had non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2011. My mom’s breast cancer metastasized in 2001. Oddly, both of them were pretty darned sick. Both of them had coverage, Rufus on a company retirement benefit and Mom on Medicare and Medicare Part B.
That was before Obamacare.
Thomas Sowell commented, “It is amazing that people who think we cannot afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, and medication somehow think that we can afford to pay for doctors, hospitals, medication and a government bureaucracy to administer it.”
Bottom line: Its a tax, Chief Justice John Roberts said.
So tell me again, other than nationalizing the payment system for health care (and running up the costs), What Obamacare Actually Does For US? ‘Cause I just don’t see it.
I wrote a two part series a couple of years ago on how to fix our broken health care system:How to Fix It, Part I
How to Fix It, Part IIAnd here’s the entire ObamaCare category:
Obamacare in America
Next week, we look at the squadron of opossums in Ninja outfits who raided my trash can and laid the blame on the raccoons.
Wordless Wednesday
Tuesday Thorn
ObamaCare zealots like to point out that 45,000 Americans die every year from lack of Health Insurance.
If Terrorists killed that many Americans we would be nuking the whole world.
Leaving aside the fact that our zealots made up the statistic from whole cloth, I dont notice any of them lining up to nuke the automobile industry.
They. Just. Don’t. Listen.
My old friend Lido “Lee” Bruhl is a retired newspaper editor who enjoys the wordplay that happens in social media today. He passed along this poster:
“The planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
–David Orr
Fredo “Two Fingers” Caronia was the first to respond.
“Amen!” he said.
18 more similar responses appeared, most posted from one or another flavor of Apple computer.
I counted six more knee-jerk agreements, two Make Love Not War bumper stickers, five bashing the one-percent, three people against Big Banks, one plea to kick the peace keepers out of Pakistan (?), and one that announced Ross Perot’s poodle had caused all of our countrys problems.
Hello? Somebody has to earn the gelt to pay for the peacemakers and healers and restorers and storytellers and lovers. If you want a world that is un-habitable and inhumane, try one where all the businesses are forced to fail and all the inventors and entrepreneurs are ostracized, wrote the one contrary voice in the Wilderness.
Apple computer was created and marketed by a remarkably successful kid who had been frustrated by his formal schooling and who dropped out of Reed College after six months.
“Words to live by! LOVED, ‘Liked,’ Shared. Thanks, Lee!!!” Fanny Guay wrote even after I had weighed in.
“To my perplexion,” Liz Arden said, “no one paid attention to the fact that the context they put Mr. Orr’s quote in dooms us to scrabble in the dirt eating bugs.”
The quote itself was lifted from environmental educator David Orr’s 1991 article, What Is Education For? in which he discusses six myths about the foundations of modern education, and six new principles to replace them. He repeated it in the 1994 polemic Earth in Mind, a book that examines not the problems in education but the problem of education. It is a topic he has emphasized since the 1980s.
He argues that much of what has gone wrong with the world is the result of “inadequate and misdirected education that alienates us from life in the name of human domination.” He also quotes Thomas Merton who called education the “mass production of people literally unfit for anything except to take part in an elaborate and completely artificial charade.” (Mr. Merton’s advice to students was to “be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success.”)
Meanwhile entrepreneur, Chess Master, PayPal co-founder, and Stanford Law School grad, Peter Thiel is paying college students to drop out.
I agree with most of the points Dr. Orr made. After all, a college education has indeed ruined many a good garbage collector. (He said “our education up till now has in some ways created a monster.”)
He lost me by quoting the Trappist monk and mystic, Father Merton.
See, the problem isn’t that we ought not prepare our students to succeed. I don’t want to scrabble around in the dirt eating bugs, either. The way to assure that I don’t have to is to keep teaching the next generation and the next and the next. The problem is that so so many people here equate success with bad.
Success is good. But the bashers simply don’t hear us when we say so.
Dr. Orr, by the way, is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Special Assistant to the President of Oberlin College and a James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont. He holds a B.A. from Westminster College, an M.A. from Michigan State, and a Ph.D. in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania.
Interesting that we the loudest critics of education already have ours, innit.
Of course I want change our schools so kids do gain knowledge, some culture, and the critical thought skills necessary to interpret next year’s data.