Mark Meadows, Asshole of the Day for June 20, 2014
Obamacare's website is fixed and it exceeded the original projections for enrollment in the first year. The insurance companies who participated and plan to participate next year aren't raising prices astronomically. It's working. It could be better, but Republicans aren't interested in negotiating fixes, only full repeal.
And while Republicans won't admit that their predictions of gloom and doom were wrong, they just keep moving on to new accusations and negatives with no perspective of whether they were wrong in the past. They don't care. In a very insightful post, which I recommend you read, Jon Chait compares Republican critiques of Obamacare to vegetarian reviews of a rib joint. Since they are ideologically opposed to subsidized or standardized or regulated insurance, they will always harp on something because it can't work. He concludes by saying
It’s not the case that the flaws were all imagined, and some aspects of the law will struggle badly. But the basic enterprise is workable. I used to go on Twitter and ask conservatives to lay out what the criteria for Obamacare working as intended would look like. I never got a satisfactory response. You don’t take your barbecue reviews from people who think meat is murder.
MEADOWS: So you have to buy maternity, even though you may never have a child?
COHEN: That is correct.
MEADOWS: Are there other things you have to buy that you may never use?
COHEN: It depends on your personal family situation and your medical situation. I’ll say as an internist, and a primary care doc, that sometimes you don’t know what that medical situation will be going forward, and that’s the nature–
MEADOWS: But maternity is one that you can probably analyze pretty well for someone who’s in their 50s.
COHEN: Right, but it’s a minimal essential benefit we wanted to make sure that all Americans had access to.
This is offensive. Yes, you're 50 and you and your wife don't expect to have any more kids. But so what? You were both born of woman. You did not spring from the Earth one day. And if we're going to have health insurance, then shouldn't it include something that is so basic that it will effect every baby born henceforth? Do we only make laws for the living and not for the future?
And if you take his argument at face value, there are plenty of things that health insurance covers that only effect older people, but they are included. How do I know I'll grow to 50 or 60? Maybe I'll die. So why should my health insurance premiums this month or this year include things like dementia and heart disease? I'll pay those in my premiums when I'm 50 thank you. That's what he's saying. And once everyone's doing that, then it's not insurance, it's just pay as you go. If that's what he wants, then say it-- say you don't want insurance in America. But you don't, do you. You just keep harping at the problems or drawbacks of insurance, and offer no real plan that works.
So, for suggesting that since he's too old to need maternity care that it shouldn't be included in insurance, Mark Meadows is the Asshole of the Day.
It is Mark Meadow's first time as Asshole of the Day, though one of many for on the topic of Obamacare.
