I learned this morning that the insurance industry has had essentially zero input in the new healthcare bill.
Let that sink it for a few moments.
The insurance industry has had zero input into the new GOP healthcare bill. Which begs the question—who is this supposed to benefit? Not the medical industrial complex, certainly. By and large most of them have been expressing deep concerns all the way up to dystopic warnings to not do what the GOP is trying to do.
Only a couple of things make sense, one having to do with money, the other to do with power. True, usually the two go together, but sometimes they are actually separate issues. This may be one of those instances.
If it’s money, then all of the impetus for this is in the presumed tax breaks.* By now it ought to be obvious that all the benefit will accrue to the top one or two percent. Sequestering tax dollars so they cannot be used for anything other than their designated purpose is seen by those with a banking mentality as wasteful, since it is money that cannot be used for investment in high return ventures—the sort which will only profit the same people doing the investing, and at the expense of everyone else.
No, no, don’t start with the whole trickle down nonsense. After thirty plus years of it, by now only the insistently ignorant, uneducated, or blindly stupid can think trickle down works to anyone’s benefit other than those who already own the capital.
I can understand people not seeing how this happens—it is a very complex set of components which work together to funnel capital in essentially one direction—but that they fail to see it as a net effect dismays me. Usually people know when they’re being screwed over and quite often by whom. That so many people reject what they must intuitively know in order to vote for the very people ministering to this system baffles me. Yes, often their expenditures go up, but at a certain level it is not by virtue of tax increases but increases in cost of living, which while related are not the same thing.
In this instance, however, so many of the very corporate entities which in the past have supported and benefited from this system are beginning to protest its continuation. They must now see that their ruin is not far away if this system is not seriously modified if not entirely reshaped.
So why would their presumed servants not heed their concerns?
Power. And not, in this instance I think, corporate power, but a confused apprehension of the nature of power. Mitch McConnell and his ilk don’t need the money. Their position in this regard makes little sense on any practical level. The people they have been beholden to in the past, many of them, are telling them to stop, but the carnage continues.
The question then is—power to what end?
Look at the chief concerns expressed by many in this movement. An adamant denial of climate change, even in the face of the military, which they otherwise claim to respect and wish to see strengthened, telling them that it is real and a threat to national security. An obdurate rejection of the science of evolution, in spite of a medical industry informing that modern medicine is based solidly on the understanding provided by evolutionary science. A singular aversion to social programs, when the large majority of their presumptive constituents support them. A denial of any rights not already enjoyed by white males (and even a few of those they question), which is most clearly seen in the refusal to acknowledge women’s issues as worthy of their time and a consistent struggle to strip women of what rights they already have in terms of procreative self-determination. (My own state, Missouri, is about to pass a measure to allow employers to fire anyone using birth control—as if this makes any sense on any level. My question is, if a male employee is found using condoms, can he also be fired? Will he? Or is applicable only to women who may use their employer-provided insurance to buy birth control pills?) And, by no means the last thing, but a big thing, a refusal to look at income distribution and do anything about the inequities that emerge out of systemic changes they championed which now many if not most of the beneficiaries of those systems are beginning to seriously question.
Taken at face value, it would appear to be a doctrinaire effort to turn the United States into a third world state.
Hyperbole aside, it may be based on two things—a perverse reimagining of Manifest Destiny and a marrow-deep conviction that all government, unless outwardly directed, is evil.
They know their version of the repeal-and-replace bill will hurt millions. The rollbacks of Medicare will put children at risk. How is this defensible? Do they believe people will simply “find a way” that has nothing to do with government to make up for it? That might be plausible if at the same time they were doing something about income inequality, but instead they’re also trying to dismantle Dodd-Frank—without a replacement, by the way—which, while not a great law, is at least intended to protect noninvestors from the predations of the venture capital class.
No, this is designed to create an environment wherein those who are not powerful enough, in their view, will lose all ability to challenge them. They will be poor, in ill-health, without access, voiceless. The women in this pool will be constant victims, unable to control their reproductive destinies and therefore completely dependent on the “kindness” of males, who will no longer have the restraint of law or custom to govern their depredations. Just like it used to be when abortions were done with coat hangars and women could be tossed on the street propertyless in the case of divorce.
This is a blanket repudiation of the responsibility of government to do anything for people who can’t already do it for themselves.
It is that simple.
Unless someone can offer another explanation? I’ll even buy the idea of a resurgent Confederacy that’s getting even for having been forced to give up its slaves. That may be part of this, but it’s hardly all of it.
Cutting taxes has become religion, and the faithful line up to support it even when down the road this will cost them. Cost them in terms of more expensive goods and services, poor infrastructure, unreliable information networks, and employers who have the power practically of life and death over them. Because somehow they have bought the idea that cutting taxes means they will have more money, when in fact most of them pay too little to see big pay-offs, the kind that might mean anything.
What is even more outrageous is the evident apathy of the people who are allowing these people to remain in power, because with few exceptions we are being shafted by a congressional majority kept in power by a quarter of the voting base. This is the worst expression of pandering I have ever seen and to no purpose, because now even many of those who voted for them are beginning to say “Wait a minute, now.” But once they say they, they are outside, beyond the pale, no longer reliable.
These are people committed to a path with no regard for consequences because somewhere along the way they forgot why they are there.
You doubt me? One fact alone demonstrates that they give not a damn about any of you. McConnell and Company have been railing against the ACA (code name Obamacare) for seven years. Repeal that terrible law. Replace it with something that works. We now see what they wish to put in its place, and it is far worse than what it is intended to replace. This is not hard to understand since they came up with this in the last couple of months.
Which is the problem. They have had seven years. They have spoken to no one, consulted no one, done apparently no work at all on devising a replacement. With all their resources, after seven years they could have produced a Sistine Chapel of health care. Instead we have an off-the-shelf paint-by-number thing and they couldn’t even stay inside the lines. Seven years! They never intended to do better.
They do not believe in the government they are part of.
For my money, they do not believe in America. This has been a criminal abrogation of responsibility.
There is no reason. They need to go.  
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- It is remotely possible that the GOP intends to starve the health care industry, seeing it as a rival in influence to other preferred programs. If so, it’s a battle that will leave many people dead on the field and solve nothing.
