We ain’t dead yet!
To commemorate the birthday of healthcare reform, Ron Johnson (Asshole-Wisconsin) wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal that is so fraught with bullshit, it compelled me to use the word “fraught” in this very blog post.
To put it another way, it’s a crock. It’s a crock of shit with a shit demi-glacé; that’s what I’m sayin’, y’all.
Calling the Affordable Healthcare Act the “single greatest assault on our freedom in his lifetime,”1 Senator Johnson went on to spin some yarn about how his daughter who had a heart condition (she’s alive and well having been treated under her father’s private insurance) would have been murdered by Obama’s Death (Panel) Eaters, and how sad is that?
I don’t even want to think what might have happened if she had been born at a time and place where government defined the limits for most insurance policies and set precedents on what would be covered. Would the life-saving procedures that saved her have been deemed cost-effective by policy makers deciding where to spend increasingly scarce tax dollars?
Carey’s story sounds like a miracle, but America has always been a place where medical miracles happen.
Nice try, dipshit. The ACA doesn’t set precedents on what will be covered; it sets minimum limits on what private insurers must cover. I mean, if health insurance companies are going to take your money, shouldn’t they spend it on health care? I know. It’s crazy talk. I must be out of my mind.
From Jonathan Chait over at The New Republic:
That’s the argument. Johnson implies that procedures like this don’t happen elsewhere. Does he have any data? No. Does he have any reason to believe that the Affordable Care Act would prevent private insurance from covering procedures like this? No. That doesn’t happen in countries like Switzerland that have systems like the Affordable Care Act, and it doesn’t happen in the socialist hell of Massachusetts.
Indeed, one of the reasons for the law is that private health insurance often contains lifetime caps on coverage, or arbitrarily throws people who develop expensive conditions off their plans, and therefore keeps people from getting procedures like the one Johnson’s daughter received. But asking someone like him to actually take into consideration the actual needs of the tens of millions of Americans without health insurance, as against the completely imaginary threat to his only family, is asking far too much of Johnson’s intellect or moral reasoning.
Pretty much.
But enough talk about Teabilly assholes.
It’s a celebration, bitches! Let’s look back on what Obama said one year ago today: Continue reading →
Yesterday, the Wisconsin state Senate Committee on Public Health, Human Services and Revenue held a hearing on a bill authored by Senator Glenn Grothman (R-WTF) that would require the Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Board to emphasize that “nonmarital parenthood” contributes to child abuse and neglect (and to distribute informational materials that specifically emphasize as much.)
