Let's Legalize Medical Insurance
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
Writing at RealClear Politics, Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation considers what would happen under "Medicare for All" to the medical coverage plans about half of Americans are used to. Moore also translates the wording of one version for the interested reader, and comes up with the following:
Republicans have been complaining that "Medicare-for-All" will jeopardize Medicare for seniors. Yes, but that isn't the bill's biggest political poison pill. Republicans should be shouting from the mountaintops: Nearly half of Americans will lose their health care under Sanders' wild adventure. If voters knew this fact, it would surely cause a pitchforked revolt of the middle class. Polls show that more than 70 percent of Americans with private health plans like what they have.Let's set aside for a moment the question of whether Medicare for anyone is actually a good thing.
It is too bad I can't applaud Moore's warning about so many Americans losing their "insurance" plans, as we so sloppily call them. Things are actually much worse than that, as an old editorial, titled, "Almost All Americans Lack Health Insurance", by physician Beth Haynes tells us:
I recommend reading the whole thing.Everyone wants benefits to outweigh costs, and a line has to be drawn somewhere for what is worth paying for -- but government mandates, as well as regulatory and legal requirements, are making it so health "insurance" provides less and less insurance. Structuring coverage to pay for predictable, low-cost medical expenses has turned the idea of covering risk on its head -- and is crowding out our ability to purchase the protection real insurance would provide against catastrophic medical events.
Image via Pixabay.
It's not a "pitchforked revolt" against yet another click of the ratchet towards socialized medicine we need: It's a widespread revolution in favor of re-legalizing medical insurance.
-- CAV
1 comment:
Yo, Gus, I'll kind of hijack your comments again to mention some bits of news about two science-fiction-related discussions that took place in your comments in the past.
First, I think several years ago the matter of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s story "Who Goes There?" and the movies based on it, The Thing from Outer Space and The Thing, came up in the comments here and led to an interesting discussion, though I was unable to find it with a googling. In any case, it was recently discovered that "Who Goes There?" was in fact a short-story reduction of a novel Campbell had written but didnt bother trying to publish. There is a highly successful Kickstarter to publish the novel. It's a fine deal--the electronic version of the novel, the published story, and 10 SF story bundles are all yours for $7, and there are other goodies for larger amounts. --And if that's not enough, it's worth it just to help set right the scales of cosmic/true (as opposed to social) justice because of a recent tirade by a lefty tilting at windmills and trying to raze the ones she can't puncture in which she declared Campbell personally responsible for the entirety of the racism and sexism of all SF before, one assumes, either her generation or the second coming of Marx. (That's not to say he wasn't either racist or sexist, but it is to say that, as usual, his influence was mixed, a conclusion savoring too much of independence of mind for that type, as it poses the clear and present danger of subverting the pure good of the all-powerful leftist state and disrupting a lockstep obedience to its dictates and the druthers of its power-lusting hangers-on.)
Second, there's a good essay on H.P. Lovecraft at the LA Review of Books. It pays some attention to the recent writers playing in Lovecraft's sandbox with their own toys, as it were, and on the whole it has astute things to say about them, with one exception that relates to something I said here before, I think:
"Other revisionist writers often lack LaValle’s mastery of Lovecraft’s horrific dimensions. Kij Johnson’s The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe (2016) subtly, lovingly subverts Lovecraft’s 'The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath' in more ways than just inserting female protagonists and a struggling women’s college into the narrative. The charming, whimsical work evokes Jack Vance at his most fantastic, but is it Lovecraftian?"
This would be more pointed if he were talking about something based on, say, "The Call of Cthulhu," but "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath" is hardly Lovecraftian in the usual sense--it's a too-twee-by-half passel of arch silliness and whimsy that I never could stand myself. (Cat armies? Ya gotta be kidding me.) As far as I'm concerned, Johnson's take on it makes it about as palatable as you could make that story.
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