October 17, 2017

Why Obamacare Made Me Facepalm

By wise sloth

Picture of Captain Picard holding his hand on his face, with the caption, "FACEPALM: Because expressing how dumb that was in words just doesn't work."

 

Before I begin explaining why I face-palmed at Obamacare, I want to send out a big, sarcastic congratulations to all the professionally paid right-wing, conservative political analysts who spent the past year screaming about how evil and socialist Obamacare is and how it’s going to bankrupt the country and end civilization as we know it.

Yes, there are serious problems with Obamacare, but America never really had a chance to have a logical, objective conversation about what those problems are or how they could be rectified, because the whole debate was hijacked by shock jocks who wound down the clock blindly raging about how Obama is the demon spawn of Hitler and Stalin. All intelligent opposition to Obamacare has been drowned out by white noise that effectively allowed Obamacare to pass without facing any real opposition. The way I see it, Fox News deserves as much credit for passing Obamacare as Obama does. For that, every conservative pundit who has called Obama a socialist in the past year wins a double facepalm.

 

Photo of Captain Picard and Riker holding their hands on their faces, with the caption, "DOUBLE FACEPALM: When the fail is so strong, one facepalm is not enough."

 

The problem with Obamacare is it doesn’t address the root cause of why health care in America is unaffordable, which is health insurance companies inflating health care costs beyond reason. This isn’t a profound secret. Everyone in the world outside of Washington D.C. and the Fox News headquarters already knows it.

Health insurance companies don’t exist to help people. They exist to make a profit, and they try to make as much profit as possible by charging customers as high of prices as they can get away with while paying out as little as possible, the same way auto insurance artificially inflates the cost of car repairs.

If you can’t pay the inflated costs of medical insurance, then you can’t get health care… even though it would have been affordable without the intervention of the insurance companies… who are supposed to exist to help you get healthcare.

 

 

Obamacare says the way to fix the problem created by insurance companies, is to require everyone to buy insurance, which is like telling villagers who keep getting attacked by wolves they can stop the wolves from eating a few people by forcing everyone to line up to have a bite taken out of their leg.

Granted, there are some provisions in the 900+ pages of Obamacare that try to reign in how much profit insurance companies get to keep, but if the Dodd-Frank bill has taught us anything, it’s that wealthy companies can neuter legislation in part or in whole, at will, as it suits them. So I don’t expect any part of Obamacare that stands between insurance companies and their profit margin to last more than two or three election cycles.

Even if I’m just being paranoid, and Obamacare doesn’t turn into a werewolf in sheep’s clothing, it still doesn’t take the consumer out of the wolf’s mouth in the first place. What it does is set another precedent that the government can make up whatever taxes it wants and force everyone to have to pay it whether they like it or not. If we can be punished in any way whatsoever for not buying mandated car or health insurance, then we’ve set a precedent where the American people can be treated like criminals for any arbitrary reason the government decides. Yesterday we were forced to buy car insurance. Today we’re forced to buy health insurance. Who knows what we’ll be forced to pay tomorrow.

Obamacare isn’t the apocalypse, but it’s a step in the direction of a dystopian police state. When you include it with getting fined for jaywalking, having to allow security guards to fondle your genitals at the airport, getting spied on, and all the other little violations of personal liberty the government says you have to put up with, they all add up to a well paved road to a terrible place you don’t want to be.

For all Obama’s campaign promises about hope and change, look what Obamacare has given the American people: A gigantic pile of bureaucratic regulations nobody even understands. Before Obamacare, I wasn’t able to afford to get a wart removed from my hand. Now I need a law degree to figure out how to get a wart removed from my hand. When people said they wanted change they didn’t mean they wanted life to be more complicated.

I don’t want to have to figure out which insurance plan best fits my needs. The insurance plan that best fits my needs is the one that doesn’t confuse me so emasculatingly I don’t realize I’m getting raped.

You don’t need 900 pages to solve the problem of health insurance. Profit is the problem. The best product is the one that costs the least and has the highest return. When insurance companies exist to make a profit, it’s literally impossible for them to offer the cheapest product with the highest return.

 

 

I wish Obama was a socialist. Even if he won’t completely socialize health care, he could at least socialize the health insurance industry. If insurance still costs as much as possible and pays out the lowest return on investment, at least all the profit would go to the government, who could use it to subsidize health care instead of all that money going to an old, fat white guy’s bank account so he can buy a new private island.

However, if America nationalized the health insurance industry, it could charge affordable prices and provide a generous return, as well as subsidize unemployed people’s health care with the profits that used to go to insurance companies. No American would ever have to fill out another health insurance form ever again, and everyone would get health care without bankrupting the country.

But that’s never going to happen as long as big business controls the government. As long as elected politicians’ hands are tied behind their backs by golden handcuffs that their campaign contributors hold the key to, then the only change Americans can ever expect are more taxes, fines, and bureaucracy, just like we got with Obamacare.

 

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2017 at 8:09 pm and tagged with , , , , , , , and posted in barack obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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