http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/05/republican-sick-people-dont-deserve-affordable-care.html
Republicans usually defend their health-care position with an array of buzzwords like choice, patient-centric, or competition. In a CNN interview, Representative Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, makes the case for Trumpcare in much starker terms: It will free healthy people from having to pay the cost of the sick. “It will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool that helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy,” explained Brooks. “And right now, those are the people who have done things the right way that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.”
It is certainly true that the Republican health-care plan will spur insurance companies to charge more money to people with expensive medical needs, and less to healthier people. (It will also transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from the poor, who will get reduced Medicaid and tax credits to buy insurance, to the rich, who will receive a large tax cut.) The idea that morality dictates healthy people pay less, and sick people more, has been floating around the margins of conservative health-care thought. John Mackey, the libertarian owner of Whole Foods, made this case in a 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed denouncing Obamacare:
Rather than increase government spending and control, we need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health.
Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.
When Democratic Senator Tom Harkin in 2010 proposed that it was time to stop segregating Americans on the basis of health status, the conservative health-care analyst Jeffrey H. Anderson scoffed, “Having people pay their own way is apparently an injustice akin to segregating them by race or creed.”
Of course, you can’t pay your own way if you’re too poor or sick to afford your own projected medical costs. Indeed, sometimes people who are healthy at the moment find one day they are not, or they have a sick child, or maybe they simply want to have a baby. (The cost of bearing children is another one Republicans want to be borne entirely by those doing it.) The Republican plan expresses one of the core beliefs shared by movement conservatives, and utterly alien to people across the globe, right and left: that people who can’t afford the cost of their own medical care have nobody to blame but themselves.
Filed under: General Problems
Really! Maybe it time for the Ameruxan peopoe to boycitt government emoyee health insurance & let them pay for their own medical insuranc. Why should “we the people pay for theirs!
Maybe if the FDA required group studies & were in charged of these studies from all manufacturers for Total Joint Replacements inwhich there would not be class action law suits against manufaturers who cause the problem for cronin pain patients who have failed total replacements implants in the first place.
I did not ask an incompetent Dr. To clamp off my common bile duct and literally ripped me up inside! Unbelievable!
Holly;
you raise an excellent point, especially since we already know that medical errors kills far, far more people than all drugs (legal & illegal) combined do. A doc screws you up but you gotta pay for it, & can only get further health care as long as you can keep working, & if you have to drop out of the work force b/c of the screw-up, tough noogies. Great idea, Mo!
That snarkily said, I’m really, really sorry to hear what happened to you. that sounds like a nightmare beyond imagining…tho I’m fighting something that may be pancreatitis or something, & several people have warned me off letting them slide a hose into my pancreatic ducts b/c they’ve told me what happened to them, so I can sort of imagine it a little bit. I’m so sorry you went through that & are still dealing with the effects.
Dear Lord, please smite Mo Brooks with one of your many, I lived a healthy life afflictions, some genetic disorder from his forebears, a viral or bacterial pathogen he can pick up while standing in a crowded room hobnobbing with his fellow cronies, or just let old age catch up with him, its sounds as though he’s due a visit.
Government officials like Mo Brooks need to be locked up in a cage, and treated like the animals they are. It’s hard to be a so called Good Christian with assholes like this idiot and others like him running this country. But what should we expect from anyone from Alabama, bunch if illiterate pecker heads.
Its never been about is insurance a good idea. In reality the prices are so very high as determined by ‘health care’ owners, that it doesn’t matter what plan is in place, the poor will fall through.
F1; totally appropriate if the poor do fall thru, as everybody knows we’re all lazy stupid greedy whiners who get rich off public money,* right? If God thought we should live, he would’ve given us inheritable $$$, or the energy, ethics, & strength of will to keep a demanding, high-income job (for surely the only thing keeping us form such a job is the lack of energy, ethics, & strength of will, along with those other characteristics).**
I truly wish I had a dollar for every person who’s expressed disbelief that I went to college, much less graduated & have many years of post-graduate education in biology, because I live on a VERY tight budget in an ancient, melting doublewide. I wouldn’t be on such a tight budget if I had a buck for every person who thought as this guy does. I must be poor because I lived a dissolute lifestyle & am too stupid & lazy to work. I never smoked, never was overweight, ate mostly vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins, exercised like a fiend (it was the only thing that ever reduced the migraines), and was always a very, very light drinker. Not sure what improvements on my lifestyle choices could’ve been made to ‘guarantee’ my health.
*I’ve never been able to understand how they can simultaneously label us as “poor” while insisting we’re living the McMansion high life with excess dole monies.
** just to be clear, this is bitter sarcasm
You’re good… Thx.
Ah, the party of compassion reveals its true face again. Is this guy a Christian? I’d guess he claims to be; I suppose his version of Jesus only healed rich sick or blind people, & booted poor sick people out of his way.
“Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.”
Well well well…what happened to the vast opioid “epidemic” that was the #1 health problem in the country, destroying the very fabric of society? The party of compassion reveals its true face yet again. Anyone stupid enough to believe that poor lifestyle choices is the only cause of poor health is either a drooling idiot or has been fortunate (so far) & is cataclysmically arrogant. Perhaps all of the above.
i’ve known people that insist that you ‘create your own health’ by attitude & lifestyle to such a degree that one was quite firm in stating that it was bad attitude that landed me in the hospital as a child….right down to the first time when I was 6 weeks old. These people are frigging delusional.