Or, alternatively, get a grip.
While the Supreme Court weighs whether or not the Congress of the United States intentionally wrote the Affordable Care Act in such a way as to make it largely dysfunctional (no, really), can we all just take a moment to reflect on just how dreadfully important it is to some people that we as a nation not give people slightly better health insurance? I mean
ye gods, people.
Signs declaring the law a success were countered with accusations of gross, illegal manipulation. [Affordable Care Act opponent] Kerpen, now in a coat, accused the administration of using the prospect of state-based health insurance market calamities to “intimidate the court to decide not on legal grounds, but on policy ground and political grounds.” Down the block, pro-Obamacare groups produced in-the-flesh examples of what that calamity would look like.
Well
sure you have all your people with pre-existing conditions who were largely shut out of the American healthcare system before on grounds that it just wasn't profitable to keep them alive, but that's a small price to pay for ... what? Ol' Biff here not having to participate in a system of rampant health-having? This notion that the old system of people just not getting treated for their conditions until they had to go to the emergency room, after which point they would quickly be reduced to poverty or bankruptcy—this pining for the old system as the true American way, a way that didn't
need reforming, is more than a little bit nuts.
If the emotional gulf between supporters and opponents was wide, the political one seemed unbridgeable. Asked what he thought about the millions of people who might lose their health care if the subsidies are struck down, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) argued that they’d welcome a return to the pre-Obamacare days. This struck several advocates as, well, insane.
“I would ask, who is he talking to?” said Dr. Debra Hatmaker, executive director of the American Nurses Association.
Indeed, Steve King
does strike many people as insane. That's not really new, actually, but I dare say they may be onto something, what with Steve King's pronouncement that sick people don't actually want health care. Because true patriots die on their couch after years of battling treatable illnesses with crappy profit margins, we presume. Or again I might point to my daughter, wholly uninsurable for any illness for the first decade of her life due to an inconsequential heart murmur at birth that had vanished within a year: fuck yes, Rep. Steve King, what would America be if children like
her were allowed to visit the doctor's office for minor and unrelated illnesses or injuries without paying exorbitant rates that poorer families could never afford. What monsters we would be.
Who are these people, that pine for the not-very-old days? You would assume they were people who had never been sick a day in their lives nor known anyone who was, but there are extraordinarily stupid people like militia wanker Richard Mack who spend their days vowing to never buy themselves gubbermint-mandated insurance even while they beg for funds to treat their own medical conditions. Yes, that is a fairly good definition of insane.
Y'all are nuts, and I mean that sincerely. We can argue over the precise mechanisms of how the American healthcare system should be structured—have you met my good personal friend, single-payer?—but this notion among sign-wavers at the Supreme Court that the old, colossally expensive, sucks-to-be-you system was the only true American way was and remains a symptom of lunacy. And no, it is still not covered.