Do you really want to find out what their health care reform is?
Heather Digby Parton at Salon writes
“People could die and that’s OK”: Why the right’s free-market health philosophy is ludicrous. An excerpt:
It was startling to see physician and Senator Rand Paul claim the other day that people on disability were faking bad backs and anxiety to get on the dole and cheat the taxpayers. These are real ailments, sometimes totally debilitating, as anyone who has suffered from either can tell you. Severe back pain can make it impossible to work at any job, even those which only require sitting. Anxiety disorder is a terrible condition that can even make some people unable to even leave their house. What kind of medical doctor would deny such a thing? (If you answered, “one who will willingly trade his professional integrity for political points” you’d be right.)
But this is actually part of the GOP’s ongoing quest to degrade “entitlements” and make America’s health care system the worst in the world for anyone who isn’t wealthy. Their ongoing attack on Obamacare opened up a window to their underlying philosophy about affordable health care. (They’re not for it.) And now they are taking legislative aim at the Supplemental Security Income portion of the Social Security System. This is the program that makes it possible for people with disabilities to live without begging on the streets. Despite the fact that the congress has always routinely pushed money back and forth between the retirement and disability portions of the program as the need occurred, the Republicans in congress have decided that they no longer support doing such a thing. The result, if they have their way, would be to cut the meager stipends of millions of disable Americans within the next year. […]
But it’s becoming quite common on the right to suggest that illnesses are not real, that people are faking them anyway and that those who are sick are lazy parasites who should find some way to make a living. We have Republicans, some of them medical doctors, publicly declaring that fellow citizens who have been unlucky enough to have an accident or contract a debilitating illness need to be harshly scrutinized by the government to ensure they aren’t stealing that generous $1,000 a month.
I think we probably need to consider the alarming idea that this is going to be the right’s overall approach to dealing with health care. They have no real ideas for how to deliver affordable health care to every citizen and they have no methods for controlling the spiraling costs of the former system. In order to maintain their “free-market” health care philosophy they are going to have to make it clear that you must get rich if you expect to live through catastrophic illness or accidents. If you are sick, it’s up to you to figure out how to pay for your care and shelter. That’s the only solution available to them.
Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2004—Powell falls to absurdity:
This is starting to look pathetic:
Regardless of whether Iraq had stockpiles of banned weapons, Washington would probably have decided to invade Iraq anyway because of its "intent" and its weapons-making ability, Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Tuesday.
"I think it was clear that this was a regime with intent, capability and it was a risk the president felt strongly we could not take and it was something we all agreed to and would probably agree to it again under any other set of circumstances," Powell told reporters.
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There you have it. It didn't matter whether Iraq posed a threat or not. Bush still would've invaded because Iraq wanted to be a threat.
Tweet of the Day
A Harper Lee novel and measles, it's the 50s all over again.
— @AnthSmith
On
today's Kagro in the Morning show, we're still on vaccines, and
Greg Dworkin rounds up the news and polls. Christie keeps toasting. On point:
Armando directs us to the holding of the 1905 Supreme Court ruling in
Jacobson v Massachusetts. It's on a lot of points, actually. Why a partisan divide on vaccination would be a disaster. How might private insurers deal with this? The ACA? Aaron Schock's crazy-ass new office décor, and the multitude of things wrong with it. Some crazy guy tweets something terrible about how poors should just stop doing poor stuff. Not that easy, though, when rich people steal all the good stuff.
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