First of all, I am not a hater. I would love for the party of Lincoln to come back. For our country to be healthy, we need two political parties. Good people are Republicans. Unfortunately, the party has been run over by self-interest, big money, and the far right. Same thing has happened to the Democrats — the party has been taken over by Pelosi and Reid.
Lots of talk about the Affordable Care Act (ACA). I agree, it’s off to a rocky start. The Republicans are calling for the Act to be scrapped, for us to start over. They want us to go back to being denied for pre-existing conditions, to letting the Foxes run the Hen house. They have no answer for health care costs — other than natural selection. The Republicans want to give everyone some sort of voucher, which amounts to nothing more than same old same old. Republicans want to go back to insurance companies running the show and hospitals gouging us — charging us $50.00 for aspirin.
The ACA is getting a bad rap. While it’s not a complete solution, there’s plenty of good stuff in there. It’s a start. Note that the Republicans were against Medicare, too. Medicare worked out fine. What we really needed was single payer. But there wasn’t the political will power and big money got in the way.
There’s 250 million of funding in the ACA available for prevention. Here’s two companies taking advantage of the funding, going into inner cities and building grocery stores. Bonus is that they’re hiring people in the neighborhoods where the groceries are going up. Check out two companies here:
This is a classic example of how government seed money creates markets (no pun intended). But if the Republicans have their way, these nascent markets would be cut off before they have a chance — because Republicans want to gut the ACA.
Entrepreneurs are showing up, going into areas that don’t have grocery stores, putting them in. They’re stocking the grocery stores with fresh produce and healthy food. They’ll even give customers a ride home if they spend more than $50.00! They’re creating jobs.
It’s pretty simple. Health insurance costs a lot because insurance companies lose a lot of money on people who aren’t insured. Well? If we can keep more people out of the hospital by helping them to eat better and teaching them the benefits of a healthier lifestyle, then insurance companies would lose less money. Right? Right. Indigent patient costs get passed on to you and I. When people don’t pay for their emergency room visit, or their heart attack, the insurance companies just pass that loss along to the rest of us — by raising our premiums.
The Republicans are hypocrites, they’re full of it. They claim to be about lowering the deficit, but they have zero solution for the biggest driver of the deficit — health care costs. They claim to be about jobs — but they want to trash the ACA. They claim that the ACA is a disaster, when there’s progress made — in just 2 months. Americans are no longer being denied coverage if they have preexisting conditions. For the first time ever, there’s hope that if you get sick — you won’t have to file bankruptcy. Republicans are constantly going on and on about private enterprise being the solution for all that ails us. But then they want to cut funding for what looks to be a promising market.
The ACA isn’t perfect. But we sure as hell don’t want to start over. People with preexisting conditions can now get insurance. Maybe folks don’t have to file bankruptcy now, when they get sick. Because of the ACA, there’s at least a couple of grocery stores where there never used to be. Poor neighborhoods could be revitalized.
No, starting over is not the answer.
The press and histrionics over the ACA is a subterfuge. What the Republicans really fear is the ACA being successful. Because if it is, they’re on record as being against it. So they’re doing all they can to stop it, to save face.
Actually they’re against it because it’s a bad idea and it’s unconstitutional to force people into buying anything, whether other people think it’s good for them or not. It’s taxation without representation. Most people actually want to be left the fuck alone. You want to smoke and drink or be fat? Fine, eventually you will have to pay more for your health care. That’s the free market. But no, now everyone is compelled to pay into a system that they may or may not even use. When someone else is paying, then someone else gets to dictate how you live your life, or tell you that you can’t get a new knee because you’re too old and now we all have to take care of the fat people and the smokers too. Now everyone has to pay for everyone else. Looks good on paper, but the reality is that the people who take care of themselves will get shittier care when they have to use the system in a dire emergency. The “preexisting condition” problem is a matter of insurance, not care. Everyone gets care, no matter how poor or drunk or sick they are. You don’t see people dying in the streets because they don’t have health insurance. It’s a choice. If you don’t want to buy property insurance and your house burns down, you will probably get some charity but you won’t get a new house. Furthermore, there have always been charity hospitals too, and most of them are privately funded. Government money doesn’t create jobs, free people and free markets create jobs, and the government mostly just gets in the way. Read the Constitution and the Federalist Papers. It’s all about small government and freedom of the people and not letting too much power get in the hands of the few. That’s why people have been risking their lives to come here for 200 years out of miserable countries with dictators and kings that kill people who don’t agree. The U.S. has been a wildly successful experiment, but we’re dangling in the wind now because everyone is busy focusing on the flaws, which certainly exist, and forgetting the basic ideas. The founding fathers didn’t come up with the Constitution out of their butts, they read history, they read Aristotle and Plato and Sun Tsu and actually incorporated the lessons of past civilizations, all of which eventually failed for discernible reasons but here we are repeating the same mistakes. Read a book called Basic Economics: a Citizens Guide to the Economy by Thomas Sowell. He is a black Republican and an economist. Martin Luther King was a Republican as well, by the way. You will start to see that government involvement in the health care system was what started the cost problems in the first place.
Great comments from Freda!
I’ll think about this and have some thoughts to post.
I’m still thinking about the Palestinians.