[from 10/13/10]
Lets talk about I-1098, so we can sound communist to people who’ve forgotten what communism is!
I-1098 would institute a state income tax on “rich” people, namely those with incomes $200,000 or more if individuals, $400,000 or more if married filing jointly. In return, it’ll crank down statewide property taxes and Business and Occupation taxes. That’s really generous, since the “rich” people have most of the taxed properties anyway. It’s a little give and take.
Susan Hutchison, who wishes she were King County Executive, said, while making a sad “please don’t make us be communist” frowny-frown face, “I don’t know a soul who makes $200,000 who considers themselves rich.” Ha! They’re all soul-less!
Ms. Hutchison misses a key point. It’s not important whether her friends consider themselves rich, or not rich enough. What matters is what other people, those people who DON’T live on 6-8 times the state’s median income, think.
The best part of the initiative is that 70% of the income tax has to go toward education, and the rest toward health. This is very important.
They could have written the law so that 70% went to buy crackers and brie for Susan Hutchison’s friends. Or they could have written it so 95% of the money collected would be burned, and the other 5% used to buy the lighter fluid, wieners and marshmallows. Those would be interesting choices. But instead it’s to fund education and health.
“Why is that important, Wes?” “Why don’t poor people work hard to buy their own educations and healths and leave rich people alone?” “Gasp! Isn’t that communist?” These are the sort of deep questions that make me proud to be an American in these times of deepness.
For one thing rich people don’t get rich by trading each others money back and forth. They get money by paying people to work for them and keeping a share of the profits, or by loaning their money out at interest and keeping the interest, or renting property out, or by selling goods to people. All these methods require solvent less-than-rich people to feed the machine of wealth! That’s not communism! That’s how capitalism works and I JUST LOVE IT!
Educations and healths cost too much now, so there’s getting to be a shortage of solvent less-than-rich people! Pretty soon there won’t be any solvent less-than-rich people, there will only be the non-solvent kind, otherwise known as poor people. When there are only poor people, rich people can only get so rich and no richer. The machine of wealth starves! Boo.
Housing costs too much now, too, but we’re capping the property taxes lower, OK?
So here’s the deal: in return for a tiny bite of income taxes at the high end (not near what the feds take) rich people get more educated and more healthy solvent less-than-rich people to employ, loan money to, rent and sell to. The result will be richer rich people!
If you don’t think I’m right about that, ask yourself why both Bill Gates, Sr. and Bill Gates, Jr. are for this initiative. (Hint: they know how to get really rich!)
Further questions to tax the credulous
1. In 1960 just the rate of federal taxes alone for a married couple on the equivalent of today’s $400,000 (around $54,000) would have been more than 50%. The combined effect of today’s federal tax and I-1098 will bring that rate to only 38%. Remember the Seattle World’s Fair? Good times, huh? Too bad we were a communist country back then, paying for all those good times on the backs of the rich.
2. Consider a central planned economy where all the industry is owned by the state, and a system of “taxation”, where the industry is relatively free of state controls, but profits are taxed. Find at least one difference between them. Lose the difference. Find it again. Lose it, find it, lose it, find it. Until you can’t lose it any more. Please.
Showing posts with label health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label health. Show all posts
Monday, January 17, 2011
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Being PH Neutral
[from 7/7/10]
We here at Real Change are nothing if not organized. Organization is our middle name. That’s right: “Real Organization Change” is what our Mama calls us when she’s mad at us. “Get in here right this minute, Real Organization Change!” she says.
So I have to go to meetings to find out what I need to know in order that all of the others organize me. This is why I know that this rag is going to print something or other about mental health parity, or “MH parity.” If it isn’t in this very issue here, it will be in the next one, or the next one. I learned that at a meeting.
Mental health parity is a very important parity. Mental health parity is the parity you get when you make mental health care more like its big brother, physical heath care. Since we will read all about that in a legitimate article here, I would like to use this illegitimate space to discuss what physical health (PH) parity would look like.
We will have PH parity when physical health care is brought in line with the standards of mental health care. Note the ironic humor: I said “standards”, ha!
The most important thing we need to do is get GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer and Eli Lilly to come up with more pills for us to buy from them. With PH parity, you will mostly get pills to help keep you from “acting out” your ailment. So say you lose your favorite thumb in the shredder at work. They could put you on a pill to stop your complaining about it, so you can return to being functional right away.
The pills will cost $10 each and have to be taken daily for the rest of your life, so getting you functional enough to make that kind of swag for the drug company will be essential to keeping our PH system operating smoothly.
Your anti-complaint meds will also make you impotent, overweight, joyless, and boring at parties, so you’ll have no reason not to throw yourself into two full time jobs to keep paying back your drug company for its worthy investments in research.
PH parity means that if you “present” one broken leg to your health care provider, he/she would put them both in a cast, for fear you’d break the other one.
PH parity means whatever is wrong with you will get you referred to a social worker, who will empathize with you and help you address your issues.
Let’s say you have an issue with lying on the floor convulsing in pain, The social worker won’t know anything about people presenting that issue, because social work schools will only teach what to do for headaches and gonorrhea. So you’ll be counseled in safe sex practices, given condoms, an aspirin, and a pamphlet, made to list all your partners, and sent down the hall for a penicillin shot.
Have you ever noticed how some people, when they find out someone is blind, speak louder and slower to them? That’s what mental health care is all about, treating every kind of symptom as indicating one kind of disorder, namely “mentally ill.” If we had physical health parity, people with cancer would be treated as if they had rabies. They’d all be the same. They’d be the physically ill.
Instead of hospitals, there’d be institutions for the severely physically ill. You wouldn’t get treatment there, but you wouldn’t notice, because you wouldn’t have got treatment anywhere else either.
In jail, if you told your jailers you were physically ill, they’d put you in your own private cell and take away your belt. But you still wouldn’t be allowed to have your medicine.
If we had PH parity, Cheney would never had been vice president. In fact, after his very first heart attack, back in the Middle Ages, they’d probably have given him a prefrontal cardiotomy and a nice room with a view of four walls.
We here at Real Change are nothing if not organized. Organization is our middle name. That’s right: “Real Organization Change” is what our Mama calls us when she’s mad at us. “Get in here right this minute, Real Organization Change!” she says.
So I have to go to meetings to find out what I need to know in order that all of the others organize me. This is why I know that this rag is going to print something or other about mental health parity, or “MH parity.” If it isn’t in this very issue here, it will be in the next one, or the next one. I learned that at a meeting.
Mental health parity is a very important parity. Mental health parity is the parity you get when you make mental health care more like its big brother, physical heath care. Since we will read all about that in a legitimate article here, I would like to use this illegitimate space to discuss what physical health (PH) parity would look like.
We will have PH parity when physical health care is brought in line with the standards of mental health care. Note the ironic humor: I said “standards”, ha!
The most important thing we need to do is get GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer and Eli Lilly to come up with more pills for us to buy from them. With PH parity, you will mostly get pills to help keep you from “acting out” your ailment. So say you lose your favorite thumb in the shredder at work. They could put you on a pill to stop your complaining about it, so you can return to being functional right away.
The pills will cost $10 each and have to be taken daily for the rest of your life, so getting you functional enough to make that kind of swag for the drug company will be essential to keeping our PH system operating smoothly.
Your anti-complaint meds will also make you impotent, overweight, joyless, and boring at parties, so you’ll have no reason not to throw yourself into two full time jobs to keep paying back your drug company for its worthy investments in research.
PH parity means that if you “present” one broken leg to your health care provider, he/she would put them both in a cast, for fear you’d break the other one.
PH parity means whatever is wrong with you will get you referred to a social worker, who will empathize with you and help you address your issues.
Let’s say you have an issue with lying on the floor convulsing in pain, The social worker won’t know anything about people presenting that issue, because social work schools will only teach what to do for headaches and gonorrhea. So you’ll be counseled in safe sex practices, given condoms, an aspirin, and a pamphlet, made to list all your partners, and sent down the hall for a penicillin shot.
Have you ever noticed how some people, when they find out someone is blind, speak louder and slower to them? That’s what mental health care is all about, treating every kind of symptom as indicating one kind of disorder, namely “mentally ill.” If we had physical health parity, people with cancer would be treated as if they had rabies. They’d all be the same. They’d be the physically ill.
Instead of hospitals, there’d be institutions for the severely physically ill. You wouldn’t get treatment there, but you wouldn’t notice, because you wouldn’t have got treatment anywhere else either.
In jail, if you told your jailers you were physically ill, they’d put you in your own private cell and take away your belt. But you still wouldn’t be allowed to have your medicine.
If we had PH parity, Cheney would never had been vice president. In fact, after his very first heart attack, back in the Middle Ages, they’d probably have given him a prefrontal cardiotomy and a nice room with a view of four walls.
Saturday, January 15, 2011
To Err Is Interesting
[from 9/16/09]
What I think the guy meant when he said "To err is human; to forgive divine", not having had the patience to read the whole piece, is that poetry critics should lighten up on the grounds that they then might come nearer to the divine. But all I hear is "to err is human", and isn't that what makes humans so interesting? Whereas the divine must bore us all, judging from the abundant lack of forgiveness. So why go there?
My entire interest in human history and current affairs is based on my love of error. I've always enjoyed error. Error and folly, or as I prefer to call them, stupid and stupidity, ought to be the principle objects of study in all anthropology and political science curricula, and central to the study of psychology. Of course history should be understood as the study of almost nothing but the trajectories of errors, propagating through time and space. Especially the parts having to do with the "leaders."
As much as I want to see error and stupidity take a central role in human self-knowledge, it does pain me a little when amateurs set about calling attention to it. This is what happened last Wednesday when Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted "You lie!" during President Obama's speech to his workplace. Clearly what Mr. Wilson should have said was "You are in error!" and "Read my blog" and he should have posted an explanation of the president's error in 500 words or less online. He could have used his Blackberry to post it from the floor of Congress. So far no real explanation has appeared.
During the rebuttal, another Republican amateur stupid-spotter didn't spot one actual instance of stupid error in Obama's speech. This is astonishing, because even I could spot mistakes in it, and I approve of the president's plan.
For example, when Mr. Wilson was shouting "You lie!" to Obama, what Obama had said was that the plan he would accept would not insure illegal aliens. In reality, illegal aliens are allowed, RIGHT NOW, to obtain insurance in this country, by PAYING FOR IT out of their earnings from their illegal jobs, and nothing in any plan under consideration by the Democrats would prevent that from continuing to happen. What the plans say is that illegal immigrants won't be given any government assistance to help pay their premiums. So what Obama said was erroneous, and if Wilson had not been such a poor student of error, he could be the one telling you all this, instead of me. By the way, I'm all for illegal immigrants buying their own insurance.
Right after the shouting, and after the evil eye from Nancy Pelosi, Obama went on to say, "... no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place." Why didn't anyone in Congress then shout "Error! What federal conscience laws?" If we had federal conscience laws, how could we have congressmen?
I can understand why Republicans are prepared to believe that Obama is evil, given that they've been demonizing liberals for decades, but even if the man's mistakes are intentional you still have to say how they are mistakes, or you haven't really called him out. Step one, tell me what he stepped in. After that you can go on to convince me he stepped in it on purpose.
Exercises to Better Know Your Stupidity
1. The Republicans say the Democratic plan would fund insurance for illegal aliens on the grounds that they wouldn't pass a bill that would totally rule it out. Using that reasoning, prove that the Democratic plan will fund breast implants, sex lubricants, and removal of heads from asses.
2. Obama said he wants to prevent insurers from dropping your coverage due to pre-existing conditions. Draw as many stupid conclusions as you can from that fact. Here's a hint to help you get started: liberals consider sexual orientation to be a pre-existing condition.
What I think the guy meant when he said "To err is human; to forgive divine", not having had the patience to read the whole piece, is that poetry critics should lighten up on the grounds that they then might come nearer to the divine. But all I hear is "to err is human", and isn't that what makes humans so interesting? Whereas the divine must bore us all, judging from the abundant lack of forgiveness. So why go there?
My entire interest in human history and current affairs is based on my love of error. I've always enjoyed error. Error and folly, or as I prefer to call them, stupid and stupidity, ought to be the principle objects of study in all anthropology and political science curricula, and central to the study of psychology. Of course history should be understood as the study of almost nothing but the trajectories of errors, propagating through time and space. Especially the parts having to do with the "leaders."
As much as I want to see error and stupidity take a central role in human self-knowledge, it does pain me a little when amateurs set about calling attention to it. This is what happened last Wednesday when Congressman Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted "You lie!" during President Obama's speech to his workplace. Clearly what Mr. Wilson should have said was "You are in error!" and "Read my blog" and he should have posted an explanation of the president's error in 500 words or less online. He could have used his Blackberry to post it from the floor of Congress. So far no real explanation has appeared.
During the rebuttal, another Republican amateur stupid-spotter didn't spot one actual instance of stupid error in Obama's speech. This is astonishing, because even I could spot mistakes in it, and I approve of the president's plan.
For example, when Mr. Wilson was shouting "You lie!" to Obama, what Obama had said was that the plan he would accept would not insure illegal aliens. In reality, illegal aliens are allowed, RIGHT NOW, to obtain insurance in this country, by PAYING FOR IT out of their earnings from their illegal jobs, and nothing in any plan under consideration by the Democrats would prevent that from continuing to happen. What the plans say is that illegal immigrants won't be given any government assistance to help pay their premiums. So what Obama said was erroneous, and if Wilson had not been such a poor student of error, he could be the one telling you all this, instead of me. By the way, I'm all for illegal immigrants buying their own insurance.
Right after the shouting, and after the evil eye from Nancy Pelosi, Obama went on to say, "... no federal dollars will be used to fund abortions, and federal conscience laws will remain in place." Why didn't anyone in Congress then shout "Error! What federal conscience laws?" If we had federal conscience laws, how could we have congressmen?
I can understand why Republicans are prepared to believe that Obama is evil, given that they've been demonizing liberals for decades, but even if the man's mistakes are intentional you still have to say how they are mistakes, or you haven't really called him out. Step one, tell me what he stepped in. After that you can go on to convince me he stepped in it on purpose.
Exercises to Better Know Your Stupidity
1. The Republicans say the Democratic plan would fund insurance for illegal aliens on the grounds that they wouldn't pass a bill that would totally rule it out. Using that reasoning, prove that the Democratic plan will fund breast implants, sex lubricants, and removal of heads from asses.
2. Obama said he wants to prevent insurers from dropping your coverage due to pre-existing conditions. Draw as many stupid conclusions as you can from that fact. Here's a hint to help you get started: liberals consider sexual orientation to be a pre-existing condition.
How Is the Author Like a Bloated Fish?
[from 9/2/09]
I've been trying to understand this country's health care system. Why are we stuck with such a lousy system? I think I have it figured out. It's the rationing, stupid.
Everybody is afraid of rationing. No one wants the government to ration medical procedures. But when it's pointed out that insurance companies ration all the time, and that they're stingier than a government program would be because they have to hold back profits, people go glass-eyed and say, "We don't ration health care in America."
Technically, we don't. Let's say you're the worst insomniac the world has ever known. "Worst", we'll say, as in the sense that you "need" nightly infusions of propofol. If you rely on insurance for medical care, sure, those bastards are going to refuse your reasonable demand for surgical knockout juice. But, this is America, by gum, so since you have a credit line of half a billion even though you're so deep in debt you've hocked all your giraffes, you can shop around and buy enough propofol to put Connecticut asleep and a doctor to administer it.
What's that you say, whiny liberal? We don't all have credit lines of half a billion? Well, who cares? What part of "technically" don't you understand?
As long as we technically don't ration health care we can always picture ourselves as one of those French people or Canadians who prove that the respective systems of those countries aren't as great as ours by coming here and spending cash to get care that France or Canada either wouldn't give them or took too long at it.
Our system works great for people who work hard and know how to exploit it. Here's how you get the best care in the world. You hope you stay healthy long enough to go all the way through medical college and become an oncologist. You make money hand over fist treating desperate dying rich French and Canadians and French Canadians. You live in a one room studio, never get married, save every hard earned dime. Then, when it's your turn to die of cancer, you can afford yourself!
So it's not a lousy system after all! It works perfectly as a non-rationing system should. People who have the cash get the care they want, people that don't have the cash get what insurance companies let them have. If you don't like that, you're in favor of rationing, and that makes you either a socialist or a Nazi, depending on the content of my last nightmare.
Further Explorations In Freedom
1. Can we restore America to its fundamental values without eliminating the public education option? If your answer is "Yes", please tell us all which you are, socialist or Nazi. We've been having trouble telling you guys apart.
2. Write a 500 word essay explaining why individual Americans shouldn't have to pay for other American's roads. If you get stuck coming up with reasons, feel free to peek in the National Review or read speeches by Republicans (post-Eisenhower) for ideas. Hint: You have the right to go road-nekkid through the woods.
3. In Communist Russia, the state provided you and your extended family a box to live in, and you didn't complain. Now you are in America, where you and your nuclear family are free to covet the dream house of your choice, get a loan, move in, lose your job(s), be fore-closed upon, be separated and sleep on mats at different shelters around the city. List the ways you are happier. Type with fancy fonts and bullets, and scribble wacky psychotic notes in the margins.
4. The author of this column seems to think that if you are the world's worst insomniac you should just suck it up, no matter how rich you are. He probably thinks that because he's had insomnia many times due to chronic nocturnal flatulence, and could never afford a doctor to fix it. So, compare and contrast the author to a bloated fish.
I've been trying to understand this country's health care system. Why are we stuck with such a lousy system? I think I have it figured out. It's the rationing, stupid.
Everybody is afraid of rationing. No one wants the government to ration medical procedures. But when it's pointed out that insurance companies ration all the time, and that they're stingier than a government program would be because they have to hold back profits, people go glass-eyed and say, "We don't ration health care in America."
Technically, we don't. Let's say you're the worst insomniac the world has ever known. "Worst", we'll say, as in the sense that you "need" nightly infusions of propofol. If you rely on insurance for medical care, sure, those bastards are going to refuse your reasonable demand for surgical knockout juice. But, this is America, by gum, so since you have a credit line of half a billion even though you're so deep in debt you've hocked all your giraffes, you can shop around and buy enough propofol to put Connecticut asleep and a doctor to administer it.
What's that you say, whiny liberal? We don't all have credit lines of half a billion? Well, who cares? What part of "technically" don't you understand?
As long as we technically don't ration health care we can always picture ourselves as one of those French people or Canadians who prove that the respective systems of those countries aren't as great as ours by coming here and spending cash to get care that France or Canada either wouldn't give them or took too long at it.
Our system works great for people who work hard and know how to exploit it. Here's how you get the best care in the world. You hope you stay healthy long enough to go all the way through medical college and become an oncologist. You make money hand over fist treating desperate dying rich French and Canadians and French Canadians. You live in a one room studio, never get married, save every hard earned dime. Then, when it's your turn to die of cancer, you can afford yourself!
So it's not a lousy system after all! It works perfectly as a non-rationing system should. People who have the cash get the care they want, people that don't have the cash get what insurance companies let them have. If you don't like that, you're in favor of rationing, and that makes you either a socialist or a Nazi, depending on the content of my last nightmare.
Further Explorations In Freedom
1. Can we restore America to its fundamental values without eliminating the public education option? If your answer is "Yes", please tell us all which you are, socialist or Nazi. We've been having trouble telling you guys apart.
2. Write a 500 word essay explaining why individual Americans shouldn't have to pay for other American's roads. If you get stuck coming up with reasons, feel free to peek in the National Review or read speeches by Republicans (post-Eisenhower) for ideas. Hint: You have the right to go road-nekkid through the woods.
3. In Communist Russia, the state provided you and your extended family a box to live in, and you didn't complain. Now you are in America, where you and your nuclear family are free to covet the dream house of your choice, get a loan, move in, lose your job(s), be fore-closed upon, be separated and sleep on mats at different shelters around the city. List the ways you are happier. Type with fancy fonts and bullets, and scribble wacky psychotic notes in the margins.
4. The author of this column seems to think that if you are the world's worst insomniac you should just suck it up, no matter how rich you are. He probably thinks that because he's had insomnia many times due to chronic nocturnal flatulence, and could never afford a doctor to fix it. So, compare and contrast the author to a bloated fish.
Health Care Happens
[from 8/5/09]
Let's talk about health care!
First thing I want to say is, how much I hate talking about health care. I'm a guy. I hate thinking about it. I hate going to the doctor, even for a routine check-up. Even though my doctor is hot. I hate needles. I hate pills. I hate the crappy magazines in the waiting room. I hate the posters on the wall with cut out views of guy's pink guts in glorious airbrushed over-saturated over-highlighted realism, which are always directly in front of me when the nurse is taking my blood pressure, so that my blood pressure can be driven as high as possible. I hate that the guy whose guts are exposed in the poster is always in better shape and better endowed than I am in spite of having exposed guts. And so forth.
It's all about abuse. You go to the hospital to be stabbed, wrapped, gagged, drained, doped, spotted, set, and spiked. Then they sew you and tape you back together, and there's usually some pieces left over they don't know where they went so they toss them, and then they send you home before you wake up enough to protest.
Who's so into S&M they would want all that AND not mind paying for it? In my experience, most of the people who say they like to be spanked don't really want it to burn.
This is one reason why we have insurance companies. Nobody wants to pay for the health care they get, so they pay an insurance company to do it. The other reason is, we're all afraid we'll be the exceptional patient that needs the the radical reassembly or the high-tech bionic replacement, or the Darth Vader suit, and we aren't billionaires.
In other words, no one who uses health insurance at all, is relying on paying their own way in every instance. If you could be sure you could always pay your medical bills out of cash or credit, you wouldn't need insurance. We have insurance, and you use it, because you aren't sure. You think that you might very well die if your life depended on the state of your bank account. So you get insurance.
Let me rephrase that. YOU use what money you are able to make each pay period to pay for insurance (or what your company pays for you that they otherwise could have paid you in wages or salary), in order that you might someday be able to get critical health care that you wouldn't have been able to pay for on your own, even if you had saved all the money up you sank in premiums. The money to pay for your critical health care comes from the other people who bought the same health insurance, who lost (but really won!) the bet that they would need it.
The fact that all of you insurance consumers are in this desperate game of trying to guarantee your health with each others money would, one would think, predispose you all to understand why people that don't have enough money to pay your insurance premiums at all might feel left out in the cold.
But it doesn't! And that's all right, because you're all only human, and you're mostly pink inside and you have cute little human foibles, and that's why we love you and we write about you. You don't have to care about other people's desperations in order to keep on being adorable.
However, you still can't let the uninsured die en mass for the crime of being poor. That used to be allowed in this country, back in Dickens' day, but not any more.
So here's where things stand. You already have universal health care!
It's called Emergency Room Care. It's free by existing law to anyone who can't afford insurance and it's unbelievably inefficient and if you have insurance or if you pay your own medical bills you are paying for the inefficiency of it.
If you're happy with that you should stick with it.
First thing I want to say is, how much I hate talking about health care. I'm a guy. I hate thinking about it. I hate going to the doctor, even for a routine check-up. Even though my doctor is hot. I hate needles. I hate pills. I hate the crappy magazines in the waiting room. I hate the posters on the wall with cut out views of guy's pink guts in glorious airbrushed over-saturated over-highlighted realism, which are always directly in front of me when the nurse is taking my blood pressure, so that my blood pressure can be driven as high as possible. I hate that the guy whose guts are exposed in the poster is always in better shape and better endowed than I am in spite of having exposed guts. And so forth.
It's all about abuse. You go to the hospital to be stabbed, wrapped, gagged, drained, doped, spotted, set, and spiked. Then they sew you and tape you back together, and there's usually some pieces left over they don't know where they went so they toss them, and then they send you home before you wake up enough to protest.
Who's so into S&M they would want all that AND not mind paying for it? In my experience, most of the people who say they like to be spanked don't really want it to burn.
This is one reason why we have insurance companies. Nobody wants to pay for the health care they get, so they pay an insurance company to do it. The other reason is, we're all afraid we'll be the exceptional patient that needs the the radical reassembly or the high-tech bionic replacement, or the Darth Vader suit, and we aren't billionaires.
In other words, no one who uses health insurance at all, is relying on paying their own way in every instance. If you could be sure you could always pay your medical bills out of cash or credit, you wouldn't need insurance. We have insurance, and you use it, because you aren't sure. You think that you might very well die if your life depended on the state of your bank account. So you get insurance.
Let me rephrase that. YOU use what money you are able to make each pay period to pay for insurance (or what your company pays for you that they otherwise could have paid you in wages or salary), in order that you might someday be able to get critical health care that you wouldn't have been able to pay for on your own, even if you had saved all the money up you sank in premiums. The money to pay for your critical health care comes from the other people who bought the same health insurance, who lost (but really won!) the bet that they would need it.
The fact that all of you insurance consumers are in this desperate game of trying to guarantee your health with each others money would, one would think, predispose you all to understand why people that don't have enough money to pay your insurance premiums at all might feel left out in the cold.
But it doesn't! And that's all right, because you're all only human, and you're mostly pink inside and you have cute little human foibles, and that's why we love you and we write about you. You don't have to care about other people's desperations in order to keep on being adorable.
However, you still can't let the uninsured die en mass for the crime of being poor. That used to be allowed in this country, back in Dickens' day, but not any more.
So here's where things stand. You already have universal health care!
It's called Emergency Room Care. It's free by existing law to anyone who can't afford insurance and it's unbelievably inefficient and if you have insurance or if you pay your own medical bills you are paying for the inefficiency of it.
If you're happy with that you should stick with it.
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