This has been a busy weekend. Ran around like a chicken with my head cut off yesterday, but still had the TV on in the background when I was home, and as a matter of fact it is on right now over my left shoulder. As one would expect, 80% of the conversation is focused on the GOP Senate healthcare bill, and the upcoming vote. Various GOP members of both houses of Congress that do not make funny faces, free flow drool, or wear Make America Great Again hats have been trotted out in front of random available cameras to make their pitches to the rubes.
Whatever the style, delivery, accent, eloquence or coherence, all of their arguments bundled together actually are not that different or complicated. They all revolve around four simple concepts, and every talker expounds those points. This is why they’re on TV, unlike the Inglorious Basterd, these guys and gals can actually stay on point.
The problem isn’t with the concepts, it’s with the reality. Despite how many pages the Senate healthcare bill is, when you strip out the numeric and legalistic mumbo-jumbo, they are frankly only trying to make four basic points. The real GOP healthcare plan could fit on the back of a business card, “Fuck the poor. Give rich shitpokes money”. But that wouldn’t confuse or fool their constituents very much, so they go all high hat and whip out the Big Four instead.
Here are the Big Four, in all of their pure and pristine beauty. One, states are better equipped to deal with their own healthcare costs and issues that the federal government. Two, taxpayers can no longer afford to take it in the shorts for the cost of Medicaid and the ACA. Three, we need to bring down the cost of healthcare in the United States. And four, if we turn control back over to the states and lower costs, then the cost pf premiums will go down, and everybody will have their own doctor living with them. This will be true if you put your kid through medical school but he can’t get any patients because the feds shitcanned Medicaid. Let’s go through them one at a time.
States are better capable of dealing with their own healthcare.
This is absurd on the face of it. A government is a government, is a government. State governments are nothing more than mini-me’s of the federal government, with one huge exception. A good size chunk of a states budget, everything from education to roads, from healthcare to infrastructure is subsidized at least partially, and in varying degrees by federal money. Washington has to panhandle all of its own funding right on the national street corner, with their $0.99 cent store bucket of filthy water and their K-Mart $2.49 window squeegee. If the federal teat runs dry or trickles down for the states to suckle at, what are they supposed to do to cover the shortfall, hold telethons and bake sales to make up the difference?
Taxpayers can no longer afford to fund subsidized healthcare.
Oh Sweet Jeebus, I love this one. For one thing, it intones that prominent shining Republican principle, mainly that poor people, and the working poor are a bunch of freeloading moochers, and the real, productive working people (i.e. Republicans) are sick of carrying their fat, lazy, good for nothing asses around. If we cut the Medicaid-ACA subsidy umbilical cord, we can give tax cuts to everybody (the top .1 percent) and give these hard working stiffs some relief! OK, maybe you’re right, except no. Say the federal government puts Medicaid into tap city, and blows off ACA subsidies. Once old people who can’t afford nursing homes end up living on park benches so nobody can sit to feed pigeons anymore, and sidewalks turn into obstacle courses from the bodies of sick people laying wherever they fell, what does the state do to deal with this? Only one thing I know of, they raise taxes. All kinds of taxes, property taxes, state income taxes, gas taxes, county taxes, sales taxes, you name it, anything for another dime. So much for that jumbo federal tax break you just got Charlie. Man, talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul. But at least the state gets blamed for high taxes and not your Senator, he did his part.
We need to bring down the cost of healthcare.
No shit, really? Why stop there? Seems to me that life would be sweeter if everything was cheaper! I mean, come on! Freakin’ $2.59 for a gallon of motion lotion for your Subaru? There’s actually a good reason why healthcare expenses are so high. Because healthcare is fucking expensive! We no longer slap a dozen leaches on somebodies arms to get rid of all of the bad stuff and hope they’re not anemic. We have incredible tools and machines to diagnose and treat almost everything you can think of. But guess what? Those machines cost a ton of money, and the research needed to create those machines costs even more. And so does properly training the people who run the machines, and the people who decode what the results mean correctly. You wanna cut down healthcare costs? I have the perfect solution, it’s really simple. Get rid of health insurance for fucking everybody! And I mean everybody, rich and poor, let’s give good old Sharron Angle’s “trade a chicken for an office visit” a try. Just get ready for hella wait times at the doctors office, since probably about 60-70% of them will close, and get ready to die 10-15 years earlier since our medical system will revert to the technology and skills of the 1950’s. Maybe with all that healthcare money they save, congress can go out and get a clue to celebrate.
Bringing down healthcare costs will lower premiums.
Jesus, Mary and Joseph, give me a break! Does anyone here, much less in congress really believe that Big Pharma will drop the price of my blood pressure pills from $178 a month down to say $35 a month just because the GOP told them to lower healthcare costs so that my insurance will cost less? I’ve got news for you, healthcare costs are so high not because of a lack of insurance, but because of insurance. A doctor charges an uninsured person $145 for an office visit because the insurance company will only give him or her $45-50 for accepting patients with their insurance. And as for lowering premiums if the payout cost of healthcare goes down? POP QUIZ! When automation made the price of manufacturing items go through the floor, did the price of the items produced go down? Shit no, the companies fired the unnecessary workers and pocketed the extra profit. Even if we streamlined the shit out of healthcare, and drove the cost of the care down by say 45%, your premiums are never going to go down more than about 5%. No matter what Mitt Romney says, corporations are not people, but their shareholders are, most of them filthy rich, and they’re not shareholders for the good of humanity, they’re in it for the dividends. So, this idea of lowering the cost of healthcare driving down the cost of insurance premiums is just another GOP flying pink unicorn.
So, there you have it. While these arguments and talking points may sound good, and while it may fool you into thinking that the Senator saying it has anything more than a room temperature IQ, don’t fall for it. Like pretty much every other piece of GOP inspired pecksniffery, it;s just another cheap money grab for the rich.