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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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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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.