Yay, Supreme Court, you did it. John Roberts' SCOTUS' squirming, POTUS strutting, Watch out for the hubris on that carpet, it has tripped up many who have marched down that corridor.
But I am being flippant, and perhaps disrespectful. How dare I?
Well, how can I not be?
From the utter farce of the 2009 battle to force Republican members of Congress completely against their will of course (it was a veritable rape, a RAPE, I say, against the American people) to accept this 'keep yer big gub-mint hands offa mah Medicare' mandate to get health insurance; to the Fox/CNN Doofus NewsRace to the Bottom on Thursday, farce has been the byword to describe almost every step of this bill that the public has been privy to. I shudder to think what has gone on behind the scenes.
An excellent example of 'sausage and law-you do NOT want to know how they're made'.
But what do we end up with after these processes?
When you throw mystery-meat scraps into a grinder and grind away at it, you do end up with some kind of sausage.
When you put a 1000 page health-care-reform bill that nobody reads into the grinder, you don't know what's going to come out. But there are some it's safe to guess are NOT in the grinder: doctors, insurance companies, clinics, big pharma...(just a guess who was in on writing the bill).
When a Republican state governor (Mitt Romney) copies a Democrat's (Hillary Clinton) health care policy, gets it passed in his state, then makes it mandatory for everyone in his state, he is considered a successful governor partly because of it. Why? Because the mandate pays for the benefits. And something that pays for something else sounds fiscally responsible and resonates with voters, especially Republican voters.
Now, a Democratic President has copied the same policy, getting health INSURANCE (remember that word, I'll come back to it later) mandated through the states, and that same Republican former governor Romney, now candidate Romney, has repudiated his own policy, backtracked (dare I say flip-flopped? I certainly do) on its soundness, and proclaimed its evils to all and sundry. He has even vowed, when (not if, when, although he's not yet been nominated by his party), he is elected, to repeal it with one stroke of his mighty pen.
Why is that? Because now it is not something that is paying for something else, and thus fiscally responsible. It has morphed into a tax, and taxes are bad for the 'little guy', even though Mitt Romney didn't give a shit about all those 'little guys' whose 'jobs' Bain Capital 'outsourced', thus made to 'disappear', along with their costly 'health care' and 'pensions'. But that was 'just business'.
Realistically, though, I don't think we really need to worry too much about Mitt Romney stroking out that one. I'm sure the insurance lobby will have a little chat with him, explaining that this whole thing has been such freaking GRAVY for them, that they're doing quite well by it, and he needs to just keep his Mitts (heehee; that's insurance company jocularity; that's also just to let him know who's in charge here) off of their gig.
Plus, that business of the majority of the bill not going into effect until 2014 just gives them lots of time to load up on 'clients' they didn't have before, to clean up on every unnecessary test in the book, to bump up premiums, to set everything up before they have to get their houses in order.
WINNING!!!!
Except for a couple of minor details...
Even the doctors themselves are admitting they aren't getting enough money, and are leaving the 'profession'.
(How much money is 'enough'? and guess what, it's a 'trade'. Yeah, you go to school for a lot of years to learn it, there's jargon, and you have to use special tools to do it; so does my husband and he's a truck mechanic. Get over yourselves.)
What we are going to be left with is 'concierge' health care; top-notch medical personnel who are only available to the highest bidder.
Good luck finding a doctor who takes Medicare. Or, heaven forbid, Medicaid. Pretty soon, being poor will be a crime in more places than Michigan.
(Yes, we do jail people who cannot pay fines, even if the fines are not their own. Between that situation and the 80+ anti-union bills both offered and passed by the legislature, I am sickened to live here anymore.)
Good luck finding a doctor in rural areas.
Good luck finding and keeping one particular OB/GYN.
And if you need, really need, an abortion? You'll be better off doing a Google search for Wiccans.
When they talk about 'competition', that only can refer to a FREE MARKET! One where both parties in the contract have equal power. In no way is this a free market, especially now with 'customers' no longer free to refuse to accept the shoddy services offered; their only options now are to be forced to choose between shitty/expensive and more of the same. Ghastly but available. Yippee.
If there was some way legislatively to curb insurance company abuses, or eliminate them altogether, especially as their abuses come to light, the consequences of illegal and profiteering activity might have a dampening effect on the rest.
HAH! Yeah, I wish.
The insurance companies have had the whole thing in their pockets, from the committee in Congress that wrote the bill, to the members on the floor who voted, and probably were the only ones not sweating out the SCOTUS decision yesterday.
What we are going to be required to have is HEALTH INSURANCE, in all its ugliness and bureaucratic horrors, rather than HEALTH CARE.
I wish so much that there wasn't a difference, but I've been stuck in the system for enough years to know that there is a HUGE difference. What the fuck good is health insurance without actual available health care?
Rhetorical question.