Article: The Hill – Senate GOP Vows Big Changes for Obamacare Bill
Took a day to process the political theatrics yesterday that threatens to harm all Americans.
“Health care” in America, speaking as a physician who has an inside perspective, has nothing to do with health. It has to do with the treatment of physical and mental illness, disease, and injury. But unlike those brave collision, liability, fire, flood, and earthquake insurance policy writers who are willing to call it like it is, sickness insurance is euphemistically called “health” insurance, like how “life” insurance is really for an unplanned death. So it is absurd that this new “health care” bill makes it at minimum harder for most and near impossible for many sick people to get appropriate disease, illness, and injury care. And the most vulnerable are even more at risk – poor sick people, old sick people, already sick people. But it’s good for the rich and healthy – the only time it’s better to be a minority in America.
As has been pointed out by many, this bill also doesn’t work like real insurance either, where costs are kept down by having more people in the insurance pool, not less. Like how having more good drivers who never get into accidents keeps everyone’s insurance premiums lower. But Paul Ryan and other Republicans seem to think that that’s Socialism. You know, State Farm and Allstate do sound a little Communist-like. And of course there’s Progressive Insurance. But then again, this bill gives insurance companies a $400,000,000,000 gift so Paul Ryan seems to be okay with insurance companies, just not the idea of insurance.
So, let’s be accurate here, this bill and what happened yesterday was not a health care or insurance bill. It was a bunch of rich, old, insecure, out-of-touch, White men (I know you saw that picture) who didn’t like feeling like incompetent losers, manufacturing an empty victory for the sake of political optics, at the expense of vulnerable and everyday Americans. How you can pull off that level of cognitive and emotional dissonance speaks to the mindset and character of these people.
Almost all Americans will suffer if this bill moves through the Senate unchanged. As a country we will on average be more sick, more people will die from preventable or treatable illness, and the burden of caring for all of it will be spread to everyone.
Thankfully, it does seem that the Senate GOP has their eyes open on this one. So for all my Conservative friends who keep insisting that I pray for our country’s leaders, I would like to reassure you that I have prayed that the Senate leaders will undo the evil that is the political cruelty of the House GOP. I pray because the natural order of things says that Republican White men are more likely to do what they did yesterday and it would take an act of God for them to do otherwise.
No Simple Answers 