Health Care

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Top Four Reasons why we should have “Medicare for all”

1.  It will cut bureaucracy.  Right now we have a gigantic book full of regulations concerning Obamacare, and the Republicans want to destroy most of them and insert their own, and you know what? We already have all the regulations and bureaucracy in place for Medicare that has been tested for over fifty years. It’s not perfect (nothing in government or business or education or anything is perfect) but it sure is easier to deal with.

2.  It will get rid of mandatory insurance. Right now, insurance companies provide no health care. They’re a middle man standing between you and health care. Oh sure, if you want to buy extra health care to cover elective surgery or other things, you can do that now with medicare. But if we get rid of the need for health insurance companies, we can cut our health care costs tremendously, like every other industrialized country has done.

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3. It will lower costs. That’s how health care works, after all. If we spread the costs out among 350 million people or so (as opposed to the way we spread them out among much smaller insurance groups today), then we’ll reduce the average expenditure per person.

4. It will save everyone money. Right now, you’re either paying for insurance on your own (which is expensive) or your employer is paying for it. If it is government-provided, those costs will go away. Your employer should increase your salary accordingly (and you should demand as such — after all, they think that’s what you’re worth). Even if your taxes increase (and they don’t have to — we have the money, we’re just wasting it on things we don’t need like tax breaks for billionaires), they won’t increase as much as your insurance premiums are.

The fact is that this is the easiest, cheapest, and best way to provide health insurance to Americans.

(Note: Unlike Donald Trump, I know that health care is a complicated issue. This article is a very stripped down simple summary and does not cover every nuance, nor is it trying to.)

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Who Supports the GOP Health Care Bill?

GROUPS THAT OPPOSE THE GOP HEALTH CARE PLAN:

  • AARP
  • America’s Essential Hospitals
  • American Academy of Pediatrics
  • American Cancer Society
  • American College of Physicians
  • American Health Care Association
  • American Hospital Association
  • American Medical Association
  • American Nurses Association
  • Association of American Physicians and Surgeons
  • Families USA
  • Federation of American Hospitals
  • National Nurses United
  • National Physicians Allianceclose-male-doctor-stethoscope-footage-011965185_prevstill

GROUPS THAT SUPPORT IT:

  • Insurance Companies

Always remember that the current GOP in the House does not care about you. They don’t care about your health, they don’t care about what experts, doctors and specialists think is the best thing for your health, they don’t care about anything except who is giving them huge campaign contributions.

Fight back. Call your Congress member. Thank them if they voted against this, and shame them if they voted for it. They listen, and more importantly, Senators will be waiting to see how this plays out before voting on it. Make them scared. Kill it in the Senate by making the consequences dire for the House members that voted for it.

And remind them that we are their bosses. They work for us, not the insurance companies.

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“We must have universal healthcare”

With Democrats once more calling for a “medicare for all” plan instead of the terrible Trumpcare plan, one turns to the words of a famous politician — clearly, a socialist — who said this in one of his books:

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Man, I bet Trump must hate this person, with those liberal views. Who would dare argue that universal healthcare is necessary? Hmmm.  It seems that this is from a best-seller called “The America We Deserve” by that radical socialist Donald Trump.

The moral of this story isn’t that Trump actually feels this way. It’s that he has no positions whatsoever, says whatever gets him the most attention, and lies constantly.

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iPhones, Insurance, and Republican cluelessness

Jason Chaffetz recently blamed poor people who can’t afford health care, saying that they need to choose between health care or a new iPhone.

Because he thinks you can get great health care for $700 a year. (You can hardly even get it for $700 a month!)iphone-medical-id

“The real problem is he’s talking to the American people like he’s talking to his own kids,” said comedian James Corden. “‘Well, maybe if you mowed lawns over the summer like I told you, you could afford that new kidney that you wanted.'”

Health care costs are outrageous and you don’t have to be poor to need help. The GOP plan where we can set aside money for our own health care is ridiculous. The money has to come from somewhere — it doesn’t magically appear when you open a “health care account.”

Even rich people have trouble with health care costs when an emergency happens. Vice President Joe Biden (who, admittedly, is not “rich” by some standards) even considered selling his house when his son got cancer a few years ago. That’s outrageous, and should make all Americans upset. Imagine that happening to a family not as well off as the Bidens.

But you see, this is the problem with most Republicans — they think “poor” means homeless. They get upset when the find out that a poor person has a refrigerator or a microwave (seriously). How dare you not be poor enough for them!

They also have this idea that people are poor by choice, which is frankly insulting.

And to make it worse, there are idiots like Ben Carson who grew up poor, was able to make it because of welfare and student aid and food stamps, and who now says things like “I made it on my own” and wants to deny people the same benefits that helped him get out of poverty.

It comes down to basic selfishness, I think, which is at the core of most conservative and libertarian thought.

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Shock! Obamacare isn’t perfect!

They just won’t let it go, will they? Conservatives are still bitching about Obamacare, pointing out statistics about rising health care costs and other problems with the program.

Yes. We know. It’s not perfect. We didn’t like it much, either. But it’s the best we could get out of you bastards, who would have preferred no health care policy at all.doctor-obama

You remember what it was like back then, right? When prices were increasing by huge amounts and people could be denied coverage or kicked off for whatever stupid reason the insurance companies wanted?

Obamacare didn’t fix everything, but instead of comparing it to a perfect world, how about comparing it to what it was like before?

It also doesn’t help that you have been wrong about every single prediction you made about the plan. More people signed up for Obamacare than even Obama predicted (and certainly more than the “close to zero” the Republicans had predicted). More people are insured than ever before. The vast majority of those previously insured (80%) did not have to change their insurance companies or doctors. It hasn’t killed jobs and in fact has created many new jobs. 85% of all employers stated that it hadn’t affected their hiring practices in the slightest. And studies show that people are satisfied with it, including 74% of all Republicans. Even the Rand Corporation, a respected independent research group not known for its liberal political views, released its study on Obamacare and determined that it has indeed accomplished what it set out to do.

Maybe if you conservatives had actually proposed a plan — any plan — you’d have the right to complain about it, but otherwise, please just shut the hell up.

Let’s face it, you guys liked Obamacare just fine when it was called “Romneycare” and when it had been proposed by your own Presidential candidates years earlier. You just have this knee-jerk reaction to oppose anything Obama does, don’t you?

We can fix all of this with a single-payer plan like every other industrialized country, but no, you’d rather have no plan whatsoever. And, of course, even with no plan whatsoever, you’d still bitch about how the President isn’t doing anything, would you?

No one with intelligence takes you guys seriously — you know that, right?

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Every single Republican prediction about Obamacare proven wrong

The Rand Corporation, a respected independent research group not known for its political views, has released its study on Obamacare and determined that it has indeed accomplished what it set out to do.doctor-obama

This flies in the face of every single Republican prediction about it, including ones they are still making to this day.

Has it been perfect? Oh, of course not — no one ever said it would be. But to deny it’s an improvement is to just ignore all the facts.

More people signed up for Obamacare than even Obama predicted (and certainly more than the “close to zero” the Republicans had predicted). More people are insured than ever before. The vast majority of those previously insured (80% according to Rand) did not have to change their insurance companies or doctors. It hasn’t killed jobs and in fact has created many new jobs. 85% of all employers stated that it hadn’t affected their hiring practices in the slightest. And studies show that people are satisfied with it, including 74% of all Republicans.

So to all the Republicans out there, let me say this: I understand that you plan on running against Obamacare again in 2016. Oh please don’t. I beg you. Don’t keep health care as a prominent issue in the campaign to remind everyone of what the Democrats did. I will be so unhappy. Please don’t throw us into that briar patch.

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Oh, NOW we get a Surgeon General

Today, the Senate finally approved Obama’s Surgeon General candidate who had been held up because he had the audacity to say that maybe shooting people isn’t good for their health.  That made the NRA say no, and as we all know, the NRA takes precedence over logic and reason any day.la-apphoto-obama-surgeon-general-jpg-20140204

Might have been nice to have him back when there was the Ebola scare, huh?  Back when Republicans were arguing that Obama had no one in charge while simultaneously stopping him from having someone in charge?  Fortunately, the election ended and Ebola disappeared because Fox News and the Republicans didn’t need to scare anyone any more.  Hooray!  Everyone was saved!

Well, they finally approved him, because there was really no reason not to.  The guy is very qualified.

So here’s to your health.

 

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If only we had a Surgeon General!

Why isn’t the Surgeon General doing something about this whole ebola mess?  Fox News wants to know!

Oh, right — the Republicans have been refusing to confirm Obama’s nominee for half a year or so now, because he had the nerve to say that maybe we should have background checks for guns and then we might not have as many people dying from gunshot wounds.

How dare he!  Why would we want someone as Surgeon General who wants to protect people from dying?  la-apphoto-obama-surgeon-general-jpg-20140204

Why, do you realize how radical such a view is?  It’s a view only shared by the vast majority of Americans and the majority of NRA members, and which mirrors positions taken by the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American College of Emergency Physicians.

As we all know from our basic government classes, the Surgeon General has supreme power over our country, and can write laws to take away everyone’s guns and enforce these laws with his leagues of stethoscope-wearing minions.

So Republicans (who also cut the budget for the Center for Disease Control) are now whining that the government they keep trying to kill is unable to do anything, because we should always be mad at a corpse for not accomplishing anything.

 

 

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Obamacare not an issue in the election

The last few elections saw Republicans attacking Obamacare, saying how awful it was and how it would ruin the economy and make people die and cause the earth to leave its orbit and careen into the sun.  “It’s the worst thing to happen to America since slavery,” they actually said.  doctor-obama

Here’s the funny thing:  None of the bad stuff they predicted would happen actually happened.  I know, right?  Who would have thought that the Republicans had lied and exaggerated?  Shocking.

The uninsured rate keeps dropping.  Approval of Obamacare is at its highest.    Insurance cost increases have even gone down.  (Yeah, they’re still rising — they were doing that before Obamacare, you know, by huge numbers — but percentage-wise, they are not rising as fast as they were, and in some places they’ve even gone down.)

And the GOP knows this.  That’s why they’ve finally stopped scheduling “repeal Obamacare” votes and why you don’t hear them talking about it any more.

I mean, it’s not like they had a real reason to be against it.  Obamacare was, after all, originally a Republican plan.  They liked the idea of keeping the insurance companies happy.  It was called “Romneycare” at first, you know.  They only opposed it because Obama supported it, because all that party knows how to do these days is to oppose anything the Democrats favor.

But that’s all in the past.  Conservatives have always been against social progress, and they’ll scream and yell as they’re being dragged into the present but eventually they’ll shut up.  They did the same thing with worker’s safety, minimum wage, child labor laws, racial integration, medicare, medicaid, environmental protection, voting rights, women’s rights, gay rights … (need I go on?)

 

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Sex, love, and cigarettes

A friend recently complained about how hard it was to find a good man as she stood on the sidewalk enjoying her cigarette break from work.

I didn’t say anything out loud, but my inner voice said, “Maybe you should stop smoking.”  no_smoking

As a non-smoker, I find smoking to be an absolute turn-off.  I kissed a girl once (in High School) who smoked.  Once.  And then we stopped, and she got upset when I told her why.  “You taste like an ash tray.”

I’ll admit that for many hormone-induced high school boys, nothing would stop them from kissing a willing girl.  But hopefully, you’re trying to attract men who are a bit less desperate.

Only 18% of the American population smokes, which is the lowest level ever.  So if you’re looking for a partner, you may be excluding as much as 82% of the available suitors.

To make matters worse, smoking in America is becoming sharply divided by class:

  • 24.7% of adults with 12 or less years of education (no diploma)
  • 41.9% of adults with a GED diploma
  • 23.1% of adults with a high school diploma
  •   9.1% of adults with an undergraduate college degree
  •   5.9% of adults with a postgraduate college degree

Ironically, the people who can least afford cigarettes are the ones who smoke.  The average person spends $3000 year on the habit.  That doesn’t include side costs of smoking, such as dental and medical bills.  If you’re trying to attract educated people who statistically have  a much higher income, smoking works against you.

Now, mind you, my friend may agree completely with everything I’ve said here.  She may have been trying to quit smoking for years.  Most smokers do want to quit, after all.  They know perfectly well how much it is costing them in many ways.  Smokers these days deserve our help and not our criticism.