"Tax me, Henry. Tax me."
"The Affordable Care Act is an enormous success with one obvious problem."
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/10/24/health-care-website-glitches-house-hearing/3177037/
Fact is the website is the least of the problems. People losing their insurance or seeing their rates skyrocket are bigger problems.
Some day the website will work...technically speaking but that is not the real problem. It is the unworkable law itself. Young people who are expected to pay huge premiums for others will get around it or refuse to pay. Just as wealthy people get around onerous taxes that benefit others have done.
ReplyDeleteFree enterprise sorts these things out so you get what you pay for. As religious and charitable organizations have done for centuries, those who can't pay will still be treated. It doesn't work for those inclined to sponge off others' labor.
Once you introduce this element of force, people will reject it. It is much too complex a system of interrelated parts for central planners to manage, especially for a population over 300 million.
The website, as much of a disaster as it is, is only an appetizer for all the problems yet to be served. Consequences is a word that is not in the liberals' vocabulary.
People who lose their insurance can get it cheaper from the exchange. I lost my insurance four years ago, without any help from the ACA. Thanks to the ACA, I will soon be covered, once they get my mailed-in paper application.
ReplyDeleteWaxman is absolutely right.
Siarly,
ReplyDeleteI want you to keep us posted on your journey to health care insurance. I suggest you allow 6-9 months for delivery of those forms. Then another 6-9 months for processing time.
ReplyDeleteSiarlys--Off topic but re your request for further information regarding an assassination poster showing George Bush with a bullethole in his forehead in my previous posting (now relegated to the dead letter office), there is a similar but to my memory not identical poster dating to 2008, along with many other posters/signs/T-shirts, etc., at many gatherings dating from 2000-2008, which have to do with asassinating/killing Bush and which can be seen at:
http://www.zombietime.com/zomblog/?p=621
Among them are such phrases/items as "Kill Bush", "I'm Here to Kill Bush", "Bomb His House", "Hang Bush For War Crimes", a photo with the caption "Snipers Wanted", "We Don't Need to Impeach Bush. We Need to Execute Him", burning Bush in effigy, beheading him with a guillotine a la Henry XVI (I believe), many lynchings/hangman's nooses, and the like. None of this happened in my neighboorhood, but did elsewhere across a wide section of the country. I copied the photo but do not know how to post it.
The particular poster I recall had crosshairs on his head and the above-referenced one did not. My memory may have conflated/confabulated this with a somewhat similar ad which I believe which some conservative organization (maybe the NRA??) ran at about the same time. It involved Democratic Congressional seats which were deemed to be vulnerable, and to my memory showed maps of states showing the districts with crosshairs superimposed on them. The obvious "targets" were the seats and not the incumbents, but the liberal media went bonkers.
This is particularly humorous since the self-admitted originator/pioneer of using ads involving crosshairs to "target" someone or something is the old time political flack/hack Bob Shrum, with similar activities going back to at least the McGovern years and continuing with Carter, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, John Edwards, et al. Nothing from the libs about those ads, then or now.
This kind of stuff, of course, dwarfs ANYTHING against Obama from the Tea Party or any other conservative group, but you would not know that from the coverage or from lefties of all sorts.
The "whiteface" posters of Obama are, of course, not in the least "racist", as is claimed, but are a reflection of the opinions of those who make them up and exhibit them as to how his character, integrity, and actions relate to those of "The Joker" in Batman.
I actually was sent the shoe game you talked about, and even played it a couple of times just for fun. In addition to being totally innocuous, harmless, and actually non-violent, it was humorous relative to the idiocy/mindset/juvenile mentality of the actual shoe-thrower in the first place.
elwood, since you are the ONLY person I know of who has mentioned this stuff, it dwarfs NOTHING outside of your vivid imagination. I'm sure all these things happened, somewhere, sometime, in the hands of some person, but they were hardly widespread cultural icons. You've given a long rambling account of things you think you might have heard of sometime, unless you're getting anti-Bush propaganda mixed up with something from the National Rifle Association. You'd be an opposing counsel's dream witness for cross examination.
ReplyDeleteMiggie... young people aren't expected to pay huge premiums for others... they are expected to pay relatively modest premiums while young and healthy, rather than waiting until they are old and sick and in need of millions of dollars of care to announce, "OK, NOW I'll start paying premiums." This is based on well known conservative principles, such as "You get what you pay for," and "Money doesn't grow on trees."
It is indeed a financially viable alternative to say, there will be no insurance, no government subsidies, you save while young for the necessities of your old age, or you die of cancer and multiple heart attacks in your freezing shack you profligate fool. Remember the grasshopper and the ant?
But if there is going to be some guarantee in your old age, you pay modest sums all your life to be eligible. Good, fiscally conservative logic -- that's why the individual mandate was originally proposed by Republicans, circa 1993.
Gary: I'll keep you posted.