…the ObamaCare Industrial Complex:
You can call this a bailout or just a swindle of taxpayers who were fed a litany of lies about Obamacare’s virtues from the very start. Either way taxpayers get shafted (again) and the Obamacare industrial complex gets fat and happy. If Republicans are partners to this fiscal crime, they are as culpable as the Democrats who passed this turkey in the first place and they certainly don’t deserve to be the governing party.
John McCain can rot in Hell.
Midterms should tell the story.
Rand, I thought you said that you did not believe, participate in, or profess any particular organized religion based on that sort of thing?
I was speaking figuratively.
Also: if there is a Hell, why not put it to good use?
Pascal’s Wager? I don’t believe in Heaven, but if it exists, I believe in it for the sake of insurance that I don’t end up in the Other Place?
Wishing someone in Hell could potentially put you there too. Remember the movie where Chris O’Donnell, out for vengeance for his acrobat family members gratuitously killed by a Gotham Bad Person, was going to finish off Tommy Lee Jones, who yelled out “See you in Hell”, which stayed Batman’s new partner’s hand (to bad consequences — he should have killed him for his and Batman’s safety)?
The meaning of this meme, trope, stock phrase is that I am an evil person and I know where I will end up if you kill me, but the very act of taking a life under current circumstances makes you a bad person who will eventually end in the same place.
Wishing a person end up in that Bad Place is not the same as immediately putting them in that Bad Place if you take their life, which no one is proposing to do here because a Certain Person is regarded as being not long for this life anyway.
But this has some strong negative Karma associated with it, for many religions. Wishing is hoping, hope is a form of prayer, and praying for a bad thing is Karma-wise a very dangerous thing. For the person who doesn’t belong to an organized religion, it is a kind of reverse Pascal’s Wager.
The Orwellian analogies over the past 3 weeks just keep coming…
Re: ObamacareIndustrialComplex (linked article) final quote:
You can call this a bailout or just a swindle of taxpayers who were fed a litany of lies about Obamacare’s virtues from the very start. Either way taxpayers get shafted (again) and the Obamacare industrial complex gets fat and happy. If Republicans are partners to this fiscal crime, they are as culpable as the Democrats who passed this turkey in the first place and they certainly don’t deserve to be the governing party.
…and there is this from the final chapter to Animal Farm, when the pigs as the self-selected farm leaders host a party for their neighboring farmers:
The pigs and farmers return to their amiable card game, and the other animals creep away from the window. Soon the sounds of a quarrel draw them back to listen. Napoleon and Pilkington have played the ace of spades simultaneously, and each accuses the other of cheating. The animals, watching through the window, realize with a start that, as they look around the room of the farmhouse, they can no longer distinguish which of the cardplayers are pigs and which are human beings.
Democracy only has meaning when there is a choice.
The interesting thing about these midterms is that the best outcome for the Democrat party is the loss of six seats in the Senate, and no gain in the House. If the Republicans can do better than six seats in the Senate, and then ditch McConnell as majority leader, they might actually repeal OC.
Yeah…right…
One of main things keeping me here in South Korea, apart from the lack of employment prospects back in the USA (I’m one of those feckless soc-sci and humanities majors) is the fact that the ROK has an easy access, reasonably priced, well performing health care system with a large private component to it, which probably explains why it works so well.
The fact that it is a single-payer system with a percent-of-income contribution (around 5% last time I checked) may have something to do with it too. I like Singapore’s myself – 4% of GDP with better outcomes than in the US. Brookings has a good extended essay about it, by William Haseltine, at their site entitled “Affordable Excellence.” If we could do that, we’d be saving 13% of GDP – that’s like 2.4T.
It’s called a Monopsony. The thing is most of the activities of any “health insurer” are paper pushing and managing money. There’s like no advantage to citizens in making these private. I’m pretty sure Rand disagrees, but after I’ve seen what happened to my parents when they got cancer here in Europe (treated and thankfully remitted), and the horror stories I’ve read about people with similar illnesses in the US, I think I’m gonna stick around Europe with its government healthcare systems in my old age. It’s not perfect but it beats going bankrupt for getting sick. Same thing for student loan debt.
This strikes me as being unlikely to pass the Senate.