Well, I think I’ve calmed down enough to have this post not be just an endless tirade of profanity. What the hell, even the morons at io9 have chimed in on health care and how it will prevent possible future dystopias. If they can chime in with their completely
asinine nonsense, I figure I’m entitled. However, if you, for whatever misguided reason, supported this monstrosity, you need to shut the fuck up. This is my little lesson to you and why, exactly, you bought a bill of goods with money that wasn’t yours and that you had no right to spend. More importantly, you won’t get what you want and it’ll cost even more than you were told.
So, what shall we tackle first? Let’s try an easy one. All you morons who thought this bill was “revenue neutral” or would reduce the deficit, raise your hands. Got them high up in the air? Good. Now bring it back down, as hard as you can, on top of your pointy little skull. Stings a bit, doesn’t it? It’s only what you deserve for being gullible. The bill will cost more than projected, which means it will be neither revenue neutral nor deficit reducing. I predict this with absolute certainty based on the knowledge that
every other national health care entitlement in this country has done so. So, if we’re only off on the cost by as much as we were with Medicare, this goatscrew will cost us all a mere $8.6 TRILLION over the first ten years. Oops. Of course, if we did better on the math this time around, it might only cost us $1.8 trillion. I feel so much better about fiscal responsibility already, don’t you? The cost could be anywhere from double all the way up to 17 times the estimates, based on historical data. I don’t see any deficit reduction with those kinds of errors.
So, let me ask another dumb question. We’re going to give everybody insurance and then we’re going to make preventative care visits free for everybody. So, one might reasonably conclude the demand for health care will go up. That’s usually what happens to the demand for goods when the price drops, in case you were wondering how I deduced this. Is all this extra health care going to magically appear from nowhere? I don’t see any incentives in the bill to provide health care, and I certainly can see more than a few disincentives. So, if your head isn’t still sore from your self-administered beating in the last paragraph, can somebody who supported this crap explain where the actual health care to meet all the new demand is going to come from? I don’t mean the magical insurance talisman you managed to get everybody to pay for, I mean the actual doctors and nurses and facilities and equipment. Any provisions in the bill to address this minor, almost petty, issue? Any at all? Hmm. This might could be a problem.
Now, let’s be real about what this bill does. It’s a huge, brazen attempt to shift the cost of providing health care to anyone but the people actually receiving the care. Why anybody thinks this is a good idea is beyond me, since this usually means otherwise productive resources get wasted. One of the issues here, since a bunch of people apparently spent years taking the short bus to school, is transaction costs. Passing the money around from you to the insurance company to the doctor incurs costs every time the money changes hands. Add the government into the mix, and there’s at least another set (or twelve) of hands the money has to pass through before it gets from you, the recipient of health care, to the doctor, the provider. So, if we initially had a hundred dollars of purchasing power to spend on health care, by the time the money passes through all the hands in a complicated dance of regulatory legerdemain, how much is left? Here’s a hint: less than a hundred dollars.
How much less is the question, isn’t it? Who here thinks throwing government into the mix is going to raise the amount money that actually gets spent on health care? No, instead the money will go to pay salaries of GS-7s to shuffle around your doctor’s request for reimbursement and some other random pieces of paper until they’re all neatly paper clipped together and sent to finance where some other overpaid fed drone will enter the data into the system to send a check for the wrong amount to a different address. All of this activity, by the way, will be lumped under “health care’ in the budget, so “health care” spending will have gone up, despite you actually getting less health care for the same budget.
As an aside, I may start a tattoo shop that tattoos
TANSTAAFL and
Somebody always pays on peoples’ foreheads. I figure if you dolts see it enough, sooner or later it might just sink in. I figure if you supported the health care reform, you’re almost certainly not imbued with enough understanding to figure out why paying to get self-evident truths tattooed on your forehead is a bad idea. Really, you’re the perfect audience if I could just get a government subsidy for you to give me.
Now, let’s cover a few facts about insurance. This bill includes a version of shall-issue coverage. This means no matter what is currently wrong with you, an insurance company has to issue you a policy if you can pay the premiums. (If you can’t pay, you’ll get a subsidy, so don’t sweat it.) The insurance companies are not allowed to deny you coverage because of your medical history, gosh darn it! Because insurance is vital! And a right! Or some such bullshit. I admit, I don’t understand the deranged fantasy economics that make this a good idea. There’s also no lifetime limit on coverage. So, in our brave new Obamanation you can obligate some company to unlimited expense by buying a policy from them. Now, in a world where ignuts didn’t try to repeal the law of supply and demand, this would mean your insurance would be pretty damned expensive. Right? If I could obligate you to unlimited expense by writing you a check, that check would be pretty substantial, wouldn't it?
Now enter the notion of community rating, which is also in the bill. The insurance company doesn’t get to charge premiums based on the risk of something going wrong with your health. They are forced to charge the same premium to everybody. So if somebody has a really expensive policy while most people have much less expensive policies, guess what happens? The premiums level out until the same amount of money comes in to the insurance company. So for most people, the premium will go up. How special! But that’s okay, because you’ll get money from the gummint to pay for the premiums if you can’t afford them! How much money will this cost the government? Nobody knows! However, I’m going to boldly make a prediction it’ll cost more money than anybody projected, and will break the federal budget. At least, it's working that way in
Massachusetts so far, so I've got a pretty good data point for my prediction.
Of course, maybe if we weren’t spending all our money on insurance, maybe some of the money could go towards the actual provision of health care. But I’m guessing none of you supporters understand the concept of opportunity costs. I recommend a primer that can be found
here. I think the pull quote is right up front in the third paragraph:
the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil
Substitute “politician” for “economist” and the result is much the same. Seems like we got a bunch of bad politicians and shitty economists around here setting policy, doesn’t it?
Of course, that’s what got us into this mess in the first place. Short-sighted legislators made a bunch of bad policy decision, and kept piling on more in various misguided attempts to fix the unintended consequences. This kept up until all y’all fools felt Obamacare was somehow a good idea and not a clusterfuck. Let’s review the first law of holes, shall we? If you’re in a hole, stop digging. Likewise, if your well-intentioned, well-meaning government regulations are causing a problem, don’t add on more regulations. You just get more problems. Did this simple concept ever occur to any of you as the administration and his enablers in Congress led you by the nose towards disaster?
Finally, I’d just like to add one more thought: FUCK YOU. You’re so damned terrified something bad might happen and you might have to pay for your own medical care that you feel you have carte blanche to make the rest of us pay for your insurance. You think your desire for something is enough justification to get the government to take it from the rest of us. If the idea that you, and not me, and not the government, are responsible for your life, your health, and your destiny terrifies you that much, go get a lobotomy and have yourself institutionalized. You don’t deserve to walk the earth pretending to be a citizen of a free country. You think like a slave and you act like a slave and you want your master, the government, to protect you from the imagined horrors of the world. Well, guess what? Some of don’t think we’re incapable of facing the world without the government telling us how to manage our lives. Some of us don’t want the shackles you would so willingly place on yourself and everybody else. More to the point, we’re not going to wear them. Don’t think this over. You haven’t won a damned thing.
Labels: conlaw, disaster, donks, gummint, health, noob
, and the 
were no-gos. I forgot about the smaller implements on my keychain.
that lives on my keychain was unacceptable. I had to walk back to the truck and drop it in the glove box.
