I’ve been away a while because, frankly, dissecting where our country went wrong and decided to elect our 45th President bores me now. There’s a sector of our population that fell for a con-job and now we’re all going to pay for it, and dearly.
Everyone said everything that needs to be said about that, now we all wait for Government to do its job, investigate all the things that happened, and slowly move forward under the wide awake and watchful eyes of the majority of those who voted, and who did not vote for the man in the seat. The investigation will move forward and regardless of whether our Congress and Senate choose to do their jobs or not, what is important now is that they are complicit – they are aware that something is rotten in the District of Columbia, everyone smells it, and while they can choose to do nothing, the longer they wait, the deeper they implicate themselves in the alleged crimes that occurred.
And so today, Jon Cornyn offers up this little gem after a week of people saying the Republican Alternative to the ACA, also known as Obamacare, is not an alternative, does not meet the promises that were made to get our current President elected, and when we say “Access to Care,” that means to the GOP that we all have access to own a Bugatti, but how many of us have the money for it? Their model pretty much says, yes, you have access to care, we’re doing nothing to help control costs, and you can get care if you have money.
If you don’t have money, maybe you’ll die quickly before you bankrupt your family.
His response was to ask why the Democratic Party hasn’t offered a plan, as the statues in the rotunda damn near cracked at the resonating hypocrisy dripping from that man’s tongue.
The Dems offered a health care plan…
The GOP renamed it ObamaCare with a sneer, then rather than offer amendments to make access to health care affordable for their constituents, they told GOP Governors to opt out of the Medicaid Expansion Plan to shrink the pool. Members of the GOP told the software companies hired to design the program to go for the most expensive option, and delay production on the project, build a crappy product and you’d guarantee payment. They could have just taken the software from the RomneyCare plan, modified it by State and again for the Federal Government, and moved forward, but no, folks pushed for bespoke, untested software which is several times more expensive.
Then, the GOP sued to stop the bill, costing the country Millions of dollars only to find that the President is a Constitutional scholar and helped to craft a bill that passed Constitutional muster. Unfortunately, your hit-man on the Supreme Court left a hole in the ACA which allowed States to opt out of the Medicaid expansion which would have allowed even more people access to care.
Then, the GOP and their friends proceeded to lie about the bill and say that the Government was taking over insurance.
The ACA is a series of regulations that hold health care providers, insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and medical equipment providers to standards so they would be obligated to provide service and product for the money they’ve been stealing from the American people for years.
Then you and your friends promised to Repeal Obamacare.
…and proceeded to use it as a fundraising tactic while you wasted the American people’s time voting to repeal it close to 60 times, rather than actually sit down and do your jobs – which in case you’ve forgotten was this:
Listen to your constituents.
Find a way to have Government address reasonable grievances that businesses and individuals staunchly refuse to address.
The GOP and their friends don’t get to do everything in their power for 8 years to break a plan that actually had a chance of working, and then brazenly stand there and ask Democratic Party members for a plan. The plan the GOP has had 8 years to write leaves the country with 2 million more uninsured people than we had BEFORE the passing of the ACA, with higher premiums, with no ability to get access to care if you have a pre-existing condition, and with the States having to figure out how to provide medical care with ZERO subsidies for Medicaid expansion coming from the Federal Government.
You don’t get to break the bowl at Pottery Barn, promising to give us a better bowl, for less money, that does a better job than the bowl you broke, offer us a cheap, cracked plastic bowl that would cut you if you look at it wrong, then demand that we craft you a new bowl.
Fuck you.
Do your god-damn jobs before you get people killed fucking around with their access to care. People will die without access to care. Roughly 48,000 deaths per year at last estimate, that could be prevented if people had access to care.
You know what the simplest solution to this problem is? Raise people’s taxes equal to a quarter of what they currently pay in insurance premiums, and offer Medicare For All.
If the insurance companies are worried about going out of business, their rank and file can work for government, like the TSA did after 9/11. Have insurance companies do what AFLAC or other providers do – provide services to people who can afford it to get access to “Premium” levels of care – to cover the gaps in insurance.
The rest of us would like a safety net. Pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps presumes everyone started out at least with boots, and based on how folks have been stacking the deck in favor of wealthy, usually White men and sometimes their wives, there are some folks walking around in Louboutin’s while the rest of us have to figure out how to cross a desert of broken glass with newspapers wrapped around our feet.
