This is the sort of glimpse of a ray of sunlight amidst the darkness that gives me hope. The bad guys aren’t supervillains, they’re just ordinary villains powered by ignorance and malice. The intellectuals and experts and fact-checkers of the world may well get the last laugh, as the right’s anti-intellectualism and mindless authoritarianism prove to be their fatal weakness.

You can go far on pure bullshit. But you can’t go the distance and produce results on bullshit alone. In the long run it’s the thinkers who win the war.

Sorry Jimmy Kimmel: your sad story doesn’t obligate me or anybody else to pay for somebody else’s health care.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/joe-walsh-jimmy-kimmel-baby-tweet_us_5908eac9e4b05c397683ad95” rel=”nofollow”>Apparently Joe is well known for not even paying for his OWN kids…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/joe-walsh-jimmy-kimmel-baby-tweet_us_5908eac9e4b05c397683ad95

But you know, I’m starting to wonder if they haven’t been a little too clever with their attempted mind-fuckery over the decades. I think their attempt to “reform” Obamacare into oblivion fell apart, in part at least, because of the basic intellectual incoherence of their six years of outrageous lying about Obamacare. Trump railed bitterly against an imaginary Obamacare, and it really looked like the legislative repeal effort was based on dismantling something that existed only in their fevered imaginations. How else to explain why they thought they could better a program hammered out over an epically painful year, in just 17 days?

Who knew health care was so hard? Who knew tilting at monsters from the id would produce nothing but chaos?

The right’s become nothing but a massive source of noise in public discourse. They gave up long ago on trying to come up with “ideas” (who knew ideas could be so hard?), and for years have just concentrated on degrading the judgment of the American electorate enough to vote for their bullshit. But along the way the made the cardinal mistake of propaganda: They believed their own bullshit. And now they can’t think any straighter than their base. And it shows.

Sad.

The Republican leadership, unlike their populist constituency, can afford health insurance–regardless of what they pay, it represents a smaller proportion of their income. But the typical Trump voter will soon find himself priced out of the insurance market altogether, if he isn’t already, and the job-related health benefits Americans have relied on for generations will dwindle away to nothing as business goes global, automates, and relies more and more on temps and part timers. The role of unions in fighting for health care benefits on the job for the average working man is essentially a fond memory, gone with the wind along with the unions, jobs and working men themselves. But people will still remember…and they are gonna be pissed.

Meanwhile, medical costs will continue to rise, after all, Medicine (like firearms) is one of the few sectors of the economy still growing and becoming more profitable, no matter what happens. No policy which threatens that dynamic is likely to be very popular in a Republican Congress. The Right simply has no incentive to bring medical costs down, and they certainly have no intention on raising their taxes to subsidize the low-life 47 percenters, takers and looters they have such undisguised contempt for.

As the population continues to age, and slide further into poverty, the stress on Medicare and Medicaid will only increase, while the pressure on the GOP to go after these giveaway entitlement programs can only increase. I predict the next step will be to tax the young and middle class to pay for medicine for the old and poor. When in Rome…Divide and Conquer! There’s nothing like a little class warfare to distract the masses. The next corporate tax cut will have to be financed somewhere, somehow!

As for myself, I’ve had a long and healthy life, and I’ll probably not outlast the Medicare program anyway. And even if I do, I’ve still got the VA. Trump promised to take care of our wonderful veterans, no matter what, didn’t he?

Well we’re getting rid of the individual mandate. We’re getting rid of those things that people said they don’t want. And you know what? Americans have choices. And they’ve got to make a choice. And so, maybe rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and they want to go spend hundreds of dollars on that, maybe they should invest it in their own health care. They’ve got to make those decisions for themselves.”
….
But framing the consumer “choice” as one between an iPhone and health coverage ignores the massive gap between the price of an iPhone and what Americans spend on health care.

Let’s start with the most generous comparison, and posit that someone wants to buy the most expensive iPhone — a brand new 7 without a contract and with the luxurious “Plus” version’s 5.5″ screen — which has a sticker price of $769. With tax, that comes to around $800.

Conversely, a year of individual insurance coverage on the open market will run you about $393 per month, or $4,617 per year, per eHealth. For the purpose of this comparison we’ll assume you’re a healthy individual who doesn’t have to worry about deductibles (which run over $4,000 for these plans), and that that $4,617 is all you have to pay.

Even in this expensive-iPhone no-deductible scenario, the typical annual cost of an individual market plan costs is about six times as costly as Chaffetz’s “new iPhone.”

But the expensive-iPhone zero-deductible scenario isn’t wholly realistic. Only 2 percent of us buy a new smartphone every year, per Gallup. Another 44 percent get a new phone every two years when their cellular contracts run out, and 54 percent of us are cheapos who only get a new phone when our old one breaks or becomes obsolete. So for a better point of comparison, let’s call it one iPhone to two years of insurance.

That means that across the typical life span of an iPhone, we’re spending 12 times as much on health insurance as we are on the phone.

But this, too, is an overly rosy scenario for many of us. Those individual market plans don’t just involve monthly premium payments, they also have high deductibles, too — $4,328 in a year, per eHealth. That represents out-of-pocket spending you need to cover before your plan even starts kicking in.

So let’s say we get sick. We break a leg. We have to get lab work done. Our health isn’t great, so we need a lot of medical care and max out on our deductible each year. Under the standard individual plan referenced above, that works out to about $18,000 in premiums and out-of-pocket expenses over two years. Or, for that span, the price of 23 iPhones.

“Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us,’ ” Marshall said in response to a question about Medicaid, which expanded under Obamacare to more than 30 states. “There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves.”

He added that “morally, spiritually, socially,” the poor, including the homeless, “just don’t want health care.”

“The Medicaid population, which is [on] a free credit card as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising. And I’m not judging; I’m just saying socially that’s where they are,” he told STAT, a website focused on health-care coverage. “So there’s a group of people that even with unlimited access to health care are only going to use the emergency room when their arm is chopped off or when their pneumonia is so bad they get brought [to] the ER.”

The comments immediately drew criticism from Medicaid advocates in Kansas, with some saying that Marshall mischaracterized and misunderstood people who are in the program.

“These are people who are out there, working hard, paying their bills, and to have their elected member of Congress pointing their finger at them I’m sure is disappointing,” David Jordan, executive director of the Alliance for a Healthy Kansas, told the Kansas City Star.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/03/09/is-that-not-correct-male-gop-lawmaker-asks-why-men-should-pay-for-prenatal-coverage/?utm_term=.e2f01309bd0e

As a reminder, former president Barack Obama’s signature 2010 health-care law ordered that all health plans cover certain essential health benefits, such as doctor visits, hospital care and prescription drugs.

The law also required plans to cover pregnancy and childbirth. That’s where the fireworks started in the Energy and Commerce Committee.

“What mandate in the Obamacare bill does he take issue with?” Doyle asked Shimkus, using the formal parlance of congressional committees.

“What about men having to purchase prenatal care?” Shimkus said.

At that point, one could hear the room start to stir.

“I’m just . . . is that not correct?” Shimkus said. “And should they?”