Today is a busy day. First, I have to properly diagnose the health care issue since nobody in the punditocracy is doing it correctly. Second, I owe a big Johnny Cash welcome to Concerned Women for America.
First. I watched The Ed Show eagerly last night, and Ed dealt with it pretty well. They talked about the exclusion of single-payer advocates from recent congressional hearings. They talked about single-payer and its benefits and its foibles. They talked about a public system. But they didn’t address the real issue with health care.
The real issue with health care is that coverage is tethered to a full-time job. Fix that, and you might have something.
Here. Read it in Slate. (In fact, read the entire article. It’s a good history.)
The success of the Blues persuaded commercial insurers, who initially considered medicine an unpromising market, to enter the field. Private insurers accelerated these efforts in the 1940s when businesses, seeking ways to get around wartime wage controls, began to compete for labor by offering health insurance. If government regulators had thought to freeze fringe benefits along with wages, we might have avoided making the workplace primarily responsible for supplying health insurance, a role that most people now agree was ill-advised.
America is supposed to be a nation of free-market entrepreneurial daredevils, a place where somebody with enough acumen can turn a lemonade stand into a million bucks. But that’s not a reality in this America, which has become a virtual feudal state thanks mostly in part to the practice of tethering health coverage to a 40-hour-per-week vocation. I for one think the best way to address this problem and to stone the other bird of an increasingly bankrupt system is to expand Medicare coverage and allow it to compete with these corporate insurance a-holes. However, I don’t really give a crap how it’s done. Just find a way for people to get coverage apart from a full-time job without paying double or triple via COBRA, and you’ll really have something, including a more entrepreneurial America, an easier time for folks who are now just pre-retirement or who are considering semi-retirement, and a population not in danger of getting thrown out of coverage in the event of an economic downturn. Divorce health coverage from full employment. Period. There’s your health care reform right there.
Now. On to the Concerned Women for America, who for my money has the worst made-up NGO name in Washington. Are you women who are concerned for America, or are you concerned women who are generally in favor of America? Which is it, you idiots? Which?
Anyway, regardless. Let’s give these morons a big Johnny Cash welcome, shall we?
See, the CWA didn’t like the way President Obama recognized the “National Day of Prayer” yesterday because he recognized it like every Preznit prior to the Immediate Past and Utter Failure Dickwad did: He signed a proclamation—which is really more than any Preznit ought to do at all—instead of patronizing the day by inviting all kinds of Jesus freaks to the White House and kissing their fat, (generally) white asses, as did the Torturer in Chief. Here. Why don’t we let the Corporate News Network explain it to you.
Nah. Let’s let Rachel Maddow and Rev. Gaddy tell you instead.
This “Concerned Women for America” may be the most misguided, foolish, assclown NGO in D.C. May their poop come to life and give them a kiss.
