The Affordable Care Act has now been around for 15 years. It’s a very complicated combination that accommodates greed, human rights, and pragmatism. The greed it accommodates comes from the demands of the wealthy and powerful health insurance industry, which now believes it’s entitled to profit from misery because…well, because. I’m using “human rights” as shorthand for one particular right, which the rest of the developed world (and maybe more) understands: the right to the pursuit of health. Health entails medical care, and thus easy access to that care is a human right. Medicare seems to be as far as the US is able to go in that direction, and the ACA merges Medicare with greedcare. The pragmatism embodied in the ACA is, obviously, the clear and simple fact that it works. Not perfectly, but work it does, even with all the complications, mostly as a result of greedcare.
For fifteen years (probably more) the Republics have evidently hated the ACA, and have claimed out loud countless times that they have a better idea. That better idea, though, seems to be a big secret, because they’ve never explained it. Not even the rudiments of it. A reasonable assumption, after all that, is that they’re simply lying about having an idea. This is clear because lying is their go-to tactic. They’ll say anything that they think will advantage them in some way. That what they say is untrue (sometimes very obviously) very seldom seems to later disadvantage them. But anyway.
My question is about the source of their hate. I think it could be some combination of these things:
• They don’t understand “insurance.” This seems unlikely; they don’t have any apparent (at least stated) problem with car insurance, fire insurance, or other forms. A large group of people each paying an affordable amount to protect against one or more of them ending up in the much smaller group faced with an unaffordable loss is not complicated. You might even say it’s obvious.
• They don’t understand health. This is possible, although it’s also the case that there are medical doctors within their ranks.
• They are unwaveringly cruel. Sociopaths. It seems to me that some of them probably are, but all of them? I don’t see how that can be the case.
• They are in thrall to greedcare and can’t back out of it, even given the limitations of our economy. And our economy, vast as it is, does have limits. One of the limits is that the resources available to individuals (except for the very wealthiest, which the Republics favor, and pretty often are part of) just don’t and can’t extend to affording the health care that they might need someday. See the insurance thing, above.
Not one of these, by itself, seems like it can be the leading cause. Greed is probably more primary than cruelty, although it’s worth keeping in mind that humanity is a particularly vicious species of ape. It’s distressing to realize that greed, cruelty, and lack of understanding are so prevalent among such a large number of people who are, really, very similar to me in other ways.
I still don’t understand this.
