Wednesday 8 March 2017

repeal and replace or never bet against the house

Someone observed in the days leading up to the awe-inspiringly awful Republican party plan to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act and instead give the uninsured and the uninsurable public a plan that only exacerbates every single, line-by-line, complaint that the party levelled against its sponsors and awards the companies that run the insurance exchanges, that if it were just re-branded as Trump Care™ or Big Orange™ with no changes to the structure and protocols, all involved would walk away reasonably happy.
Having had six years to stew over the act’s passage despite every effort to destroy it and still failing to have a contingency at the ready when their chance came, the controlling cadre of law-makers were compelled to fast-track some bit of garbage legislation with no one to stop them. Indeed, who in fact knew health care could be this easy?  There is a year-long moratorium on reproductive care and support for new parents because—why not?  With many Americans left in a quite precarious state, bereft of a measure of security and peace-of-mind, substituting subsidising health-care and making insurers less prone to discriminate over less than optimal wagers with tax credits that are overwhelmingly in favour of the regressively better-off is not a tenable surrogate and only ensures that the poor will stay poor and those preventable ailments of poverty will remain with generational consequences.