This is the essence of the debate over ObamaCare, distilled: the liberals (not the leftists, who know this debate isn’t about health insurance at all, but rather about creating permanent clients in order to seize control over the electoral process) believe they know best what every individual American wants and needs, and because of this, they assume that their mandates are compassionate — and that forcing people to accept them is doing those people a favor. That is, this is tough love, from the liberal perspective. And anyone who dares deny them the gratitude they believe they deserve is accused of wanting people to be left uninsured, or wanting the poor to suffer, etc. — as if it is the responsibility of an individual or an individual family working to support himself/herself/itself to make sure every other person in the US is covered.
It isn’t. There’s a difference between a safety net and an entitlement, and ObamaCare tries to argue that heath insurance is a “right” and that health care itself is a “right” — which presupposes that those who provide it are answerable to those whose right it is to have it, a move that turns entire industries into chattel whose learning and labor is owned by those who make demands upon it and enforced by the State.
What Obamacare is designed to do is make private insurance for the middle class consumer onerous; for those who can continue to afford it, it is merely a wealth redistribution scheme that lowers their standard of living by robbing them of some of their purchasing power, while at the same time providing universal subsidized care for those who might otherwise have to join Medicaid; for those who can’t continue to afford it, they will be moved into exchanges, robbed of some of their purchasing power anyway, until eventually they, too, qualify for subsidies. And by working this way, ObamaCare will destroy the middle class and bring about a kind of radical egalitarianism that Obama’s ideology demands. Naturally, those who run the world aren’t required to live by these rules — it’s hard work being a god, and that has to come with some perks, like not having to abide by the laws you pass and compel others to obey — but in the end, it resets what to the left is the natural order of things: they control the masses, and the masses answer to them.
There’s a reason these people couple such schemes with demands that the 2nd Amendment be effectively neutered, even as they militarize all of the bureaucratic agencies under the federal government’s purview.
It can happen here. It is happening here. But it doesn’t have to.
And if the GOP is already selling us Chris Christie as the answer — yet another big government poser who is more eager to reach across party lines and attain popularity than he is to fight for principle — they have no idea the mutiny that is coming at the ballot box.
Right now they’re bullying the middle class to pony up more money for their health insurance in order to also pay for others. Can’t wait until they start bullying doctors and hospitals to serve them at cost (or worse). If they really thought healthcare was “broken” in 2009 they’re in for a big surprise.
Hey, Romney has endorsed Christie: http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Mitt-Romney-Says-Chris-Christie-Can-Save-Our-4951477.php
There’s no point in even having a primary or convention now, right?
Could Virginia Start Forcing MD’s to Accept Medicare & Medicaid Patients?
Elections, SBP? What difference, at this point, do they make?
None, apparently. We must nominate “electable” candidates, who turn out to be about as electable as Obamacare is affordable.
I heard Ann Coulter on the Prager show the other day, and it sounded like a establishment republican orgy.
Prager would say something about the TEA Party ‘Purity Tests’ and Ann would scream “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Then Prager would moan “I love your mind”. It all sounded oddly erotic.
Anyway, Coulter was saying over and over (“as I say in my new book please buy my new book!”) “first, we have to get people elected”.
I wanted to call in and say (I was driving, so I just yelled at the dashboard instead) “Yeah, McCain was elected, McConnell and Lindsey and Collins too. What now?
Boehner was elected and all he can do is cry that we have 1/2 0f 1/3 of the government give away the farm.
No Ann, electing more republicans is worthless if they won’t fight for their principles.
Stupid bint. And Prager has become unlistenable too.
Could Virginia Start Forcing MD’s to Accept Medicare & Medicaid Patients?
Sure they could, as could any other state. Since medical licenses are issued at the state level, they can put in place whatever crazy “minimum number of Medicare & Medicaid patients” requirements or quotas they want to for your license renewal. But there’s nothing stopping the MD’s in Virginia from choosing to move their practice to another, saner, state.
For the Feds, the only control they have over docs is their ability to prescribe restricted drugs. Start basing DEA license renewals on “minimum numbers of Medicare & Medicaid patients” quotas and the MD’s choices would be to go along, give up your ability to prescribe anything more potent than Tylenol or just quit. And since accepting what would be no doubt high numbers of money losing patients would be a practice killer anyway, there would be a lot of incentive to just say screw it and retire or find another line of work.
And if the GOP is already selling us Chris Christie as the answer
Yeah, fuck him and the clown car he will be riding in.
“Hey, Romney has endorsed Christie”
Oh good. The inevitable loser is on board. Now if we can just get Joh McCain to call him an honorable American and have Michael Dukakis hug him…
Jeff wrote: …they have no idea the mutiny that is coming at the ballot box.
I am not as optimistic as you, Jeff.
I think the majority of American voters are too far gone into the black hole of Leftism.
Therefore, I’ll believe it when I see the damn thing happening.
I am not as optimistic as you, Jeff.
Nor am I. Fix things through the ballot box? I think that ship has sailed. Even if we could manage to find and elect an army of Rand Paul and Ted Cruz clones, they would still be facing the gale-force headwind of an entrenched system of politics and government bureaucracy that would foil them or ignore them at every turn.
That’s one thing that the ascendance of President Petulant to the throne has made very clear. Politicians and bureaucrats no longer answer to us, and they aren’t bothering to pretend anymore that they do. Look at the all the House investigations over the last couple of years (Fast & Furious, IRS, NSA, FBI spying on journalists, etc. ad nauseum) and how, time and time again, the cabinet or gov’t “official” they are attempting to hold accountable essentially says, “Yeah, I’m not gonna do that, and I’m not gonna give you what you want”. How many different demands for documents have been ignored so far? And what’s the next step? Nothing, apparently.
Much as I hate the idea of all the pain and loss that is going to result, I’m ready to just let it all collapse, save those who can be saved, work to clear the wreckage and rebuild using that dusty old 200+ year old document as our blueprint.
Gallup has His Nibs at 40% approval today.
Ouch, eh Barry?
If Chris Christie is the answer, you’re asking the wrong question.
“you’re asking the wrong question.”
what you got against tasty cakes mr.?
Ditto. But if said attitude precludes attempting to immanentize our desired eschaton, our pessimism would prove to be self-fulfilling.
“immanentize our desired eschato”
Our goals are quite temporal, achievable, and secular are they not? We’ve seen our supposed golden age and know it was not golden, and a bit intermittent to be called an age. It is not some mythical endpoint to history we seek but merely a well known state that is self evidently preferable to the great authoritarian lefty flail towards some combination of flames, famine, misery, war, skulls, lies, insanity,and eventually capitalist sponsorship in the guise of cultural outreach.
Heh. Our eschaton in 2013 is simply to get the Beltway carbuncles off the nation’s ass for a few years so the nation can get its keel back under it — not a utopia in which metaphors and similes can lie down together in peace for all time.
Heh. My name is Steve kept yabbering about a mythical golden age that never existed that was supposedly the tea-party goal. The silly doofus never heard of 1982-2000 ? Or the Bush W tax cuts? Who you gonna believe? Your own lying eyes over the last twenty years or an oblique reference to an NPR blurb about a Mother Jones piece seen on Slate’s blog comments six years ago?
2003 was a mythical golden age y’all! We can’t go back to what never was! Honk honk honk! (Harpo run around grinning like lunatic and cuts off a man’s necktie with a huge pair of scissors) Honk honk honk!
One strange thing is the profound disregard as TheClownDisaster and His MerryZeke’s deploy a “system” actually fucking over their own people this way and that, with this ClownDisasterGroupOBenefaction shrugging every suffering aside.
They simply don’t give a shit, in an actual performance of the very wrong of which Bongino is falsely accused.
I mean, really, as a political event, it transcends bizarro — and if a reasonable motive were sought? ‘twould probably land on Revenge.
FB lefty defenders of the Schwanz in Chief have gone uncharacteristically silent over the weekend.
“Maybe he does kind of suck at this presidenting” a few are heard to mutter.
They’ll perk right back up when they’re reminded that Chris Christie wants the poor people homeless and starving so there’s more chipped beef for him to eat, and that he wants to outlaw birth control so alls the wymyns get impregnated –by him personally.
After which he’ll force everyone to go to church on Sunday.