Bill Crystal was a guest on Morning Joe (MSNBC) this morning. As is his manner on talk shows, he talked over anyone who tried to interject comments or ask questions about his position on Obamacare or the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA). He implied that the conservative health care programs would have been better than Obama’s program—that is a Fox News type lie. As usual, he ignored some basic facts; they had no program other then a free enterprise health care system and a free enterprise insurance system. If you are a Democrat and want to argue against his assertion about how bad ACA is, you should point out several things. The first is that the free enterprise health care system is what we had and it was a disaster. Medical costs skyrocketed. The second is the basic insurance principle; if everyone pays, the costs are less. The Republicans ague that young people who do not want health insurance still have to pay for what they feel they do not need or want.
Hospitals, doctors, medical instrument manufacturers, and pharmacology
companies were unregulated and charged outlandish prices to increase profits. I
like to point out that this is based on selfishness, an underlying Republican
trait. Free enterprise does not work with medical care for several reasons, of
which the major one is that health care is not a voluntary need. Insurance companies
were operating without regulations. They collected premium but refused to pay medical
claims. They wrote small print contracts, which allowed them to drop clients
when they became ill, preexisting conditions, caps on total cost, pay only a percentage
of cost, etc. They did this for one reason and one reason only, profits. ACA
stops most of that. Republicans hate facing the truth, which is what calling
them greedy is.
The biggest thing is that a person like Bill Crystal is that he sincerely believes that if a person cannot pay an insurance premium, he should not have medical care. He and people like him are not incapable of understanding that a $7.50 per hour job and a $1200 a month insurance premium is not realistic. He believes such a person is a “leech”, living off the premiums the government “forces” young health people to pay and deplores the idea that the government is involved. He denies the fact that people are paying for their own insurance. Like Romney, he believes they are among the 47% living off the government. He believes the government is wrong to regulate doctor, hospitals and insurance companies, or catches them cheating.
It would have been great if Bill Crystal and every one of
the Republicans had worked to make the ACA the best program possible instead of
sabotaging it. I know that the first people in line to take advantage of ACA
will be Republicans. How do I know that? Every
retired Republican I know curses out the Social Security as a socialists
program while they are first in line to cash there “government” check each month.
As a postscript, many of them have paid
the minimum amount to qualify for benefits and some old guys even adopt
children they claim as dependants in increase their benefits—a system that works
well for expatriates who live in countries that have low cost of living.
URL: firetreepub.blogspot.com
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