Let them die and decrease the surplus population
By Capt Fogg
One presidential candidate in a dress doesn't make the whole party into drag queens, but evidently, if we can find a welfare queen (or invent one as Ronald Reagan did) we can dump the whole project. That's Republogic. If we can find find one Social Security recipient who is making a few bucks on the side the entire system should go and let's cement the mordant logic of this with some gratuitous smears and sneers and a chorus of LiberalLiberalLiberalLiberal!
I do not know if the Frost Family or their son Graeme were the perfect people to use as an argument for the S-CHIP program. I can think and without much effort, of many people held up as patriots, saints and heroes recently without qualification for the job, but somehow this Baltimore family proves to the already convinced that every-man-for-himself libertarianism serves justice and the Christian Principle of "I've got mine" that our country is supposedly built upon.
Robert Stacy McCain, the assistant National Editor of the Moonie owned Washington Times insists that Michelle Malkin is only doing what good reporters do by presenting the Frosts as insurance cheats and giving us an off the cuff appraisal of their assets, which "proves" that they could have afforded health insurance sufficient to cover their misfortunes. Assuredly that appraisal is flawed at least in some respects.
Talking about private school tuition without mentioning the full scholarship that pays for Graeme -- and that the other "elite" private school is for his disabled sister and his parent's don't pay a dime for it, isn't exactly Kosher but you can easily make the smell go away by reciting 10 LiberalLiberalLiberals and showing pictures of shiny new cars that aren't the ones they actually own. Sure, another house nearby sold for a half million, but I'm sure the owner's equity was somewhat less. There are houses within a mile of mine that sold, before the slump, for tens of millions, but I don't own one of them and the bottom line is that their "lavish" home in a less than safe neighborhood was purchased for $55,000 which is in line with a low end mobile home in South Florida. They have two mortgages.
The purpose of S-CHIP stems from the undeniable fact that many people who earn a living and own their homes cannot come close to affording adequate health insurance for their children. It's this fact that the Malkins and other Fuck You Conservatives are trying to obscure.
Yes, Halsey Frost has a business and the business owns property but together they earn less that $50,000 a year. Look up the cost of private health insurance for a family of four with medical problems and tell me how much would be left over after paying premiums. Sure they could sell the business and house and live in the Chevy Suburban but who would pay next year's premiums? No, the Frost's aren't indigent but without insurance they might well be homeless burdens on the State. Ever since the Great Depression, the Republican Party has spread the notion that the poor are poor because they are lazy and shiftless although crushing medical bills are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy and one way or the other, the burden of supporting the medical industry's massive profits falls on all of us, whether we help the less affluent children or let them decrease the surplus population.
But McCain says Malkin will prove her assertion and I will agree, but of course the definition of proof will be part of the proof and will be as relevant as McCain's blaming of Al Gore for the level of viciousness in public discourse and his truly idiotic repetition of a fictitious claim to have invented the Internet. The retarded right never seems to tire of that one.
The "proof" of course, wouldn't really diminish the need for the program. The existence of widespread insurance fraud does not argue against the need for insurance, it only argues for proper enforcement and procedure. But of course we're dealing with idiots who think failures of government argue for feudalism or even anarchy. The existence of publications by anti-American Korean religious crazies who have proclaimed themselves to be God or Australian plutocrats pretending to report news in the public interest doesn't argue against the legitimate ones either - as few as they may be.
Cross posted from Human Voices
One presidential candidate in a dress doesn't make the whole party into drag queens, but evidently, if we can find a welfare queen (or invent one as Ronald Reagan did) we can dump the whole project. That's Republogic. If we can find find one Social Security recipient who is making a few bucks on the side the entire system should go and let's cement the mordant logic of this with some gratuitous smears and sneers and a chorus of LiberalLiberalLiberalLiberal!
I do not know if the Frost Family or their son Graeme were the perfect people to use as an argument for the S-CHIP program. I can think and without much effort, of many people held up as patriots, saints and heroes recently without qualification for the job, but somehow this Baltimore family proves to the already convinced that every-man-for-himself libertarianism serves justice and the Christian Principle of "I've got mine" that our country is supposedly built upon.
Robert Stacy McCain, the assistant National Editor of the Moonie owned Washington Times insists that Michelle Malkin is only doing what good reporters do by presenting the Frosts as insurance cheats and giving us an off the cuff appraisal of their assets, which "proves" that they could have afforded health insurance sufficient to cover their misfortunes. Assuredly that appraisal is flawed at least in some respects.
Talking about private school tuition without mentioning the full scholarship that pays for Graeme -- and that the other "elite" private school is for his disabled sister and his parent's don't pay a dime for it, isn't exactly Kosher but you can easily make the smell go away by reciting 10 LiberalLiberalLiberals and showing pictures of shiny new cars that aren't the ones they actually own. Sure, another house nearby sold for a half million, but I'm sure the owner's equity was somewhat less. There are houses within a mile of mine that sold, before the slump, for tens of millions, but I don't own one of them and the bottom line is that their "lavish" home in a less than safe neighborhood was purchased for $55,000 which is in line with a low end mobile home in South Florida. They have two mortgages.
The purpose of S-CHIP stems from the undeniable fact that many people who earn a living and own their homes cannot come close to affording adequate health insurance for their children. It's this fact that the Malkins and other Fuck You Conservatives are trying to obscure.
Yes, Halsey Frost has a business and the business owns property but together they earn less that $50,000 a year. Look up the cost of private health insurance for a family of four with medical problems and tell me how much would be left over after paying premiums. Sure they could sell the business and house and live in the Chevy Suburban but who would pay next year's premiums? No, the Frost's aren't indigent but without insurance they might well be homeless burdens on the State. Ever since the Great Depression, the Republican Party has spread the notion that the poor are poor because they are lazy and shiftless although crushing medical bills are the number one cause of personal bankruptcy and one way or the other, the burden of supporting the medical industry's massive profits falls on all of us, whether we help the less affluent children or let them decrease the surplus population.
But McCain says Malkin will prove her assertion and I will agree, but of course the definition of proof will be part of the proof and will be as relevant as McCain's blaming of Al Gore for the level of viciousness in public discourse and his truly idiotic repetition of a fictitious claim to have invented the Internet. The retarded right never seems to tire of that one.
The "proof" of course, wouldn't really diminish the need for the program. The existence of widespread insurance fraud does not argue against the need for insurance, it only argues for proper enforcement and procedure. But of course we're dealing with idiots who think failures of government argue for feudalism or even anarchy. The existence of publications by anti-American Korean religious crazies who have proclaimed themselves to be God or Australian plutocrats pretending to report news in the public interest doesn't argue against the legitimate ones either - as few as they may be.
Cross posted from Human Voices
posted by Libby Spencer at 11:57 AM
2 Comments:
Well said Fogg and really good point that the prime cause of bankruptcy is catastrophic illness.
And of course the Bushies have made it much harder to declare bankrptcy - to protect the corporations, of course.
People tend to feel smug when they work for companies that give them health care, but perhaps they aren't aware of what it costs to cover a family to insure against catastrophic illness, not to speak of low deductible insurance with dental coverage. It's the difference between getting by and living in a cardboard box.
With a government that tells us it's promoting entrepreneurship through tax cuts to the upper 2%, it's hard to see honesty in promoting a system that makes it dangerous to start your own business and risk total disaster if someone gets sick. What it is really about is to keep the labor supply for big corporations high through increasing the risks and expense for the little guy.
And of course it also promotes a population that isn't as healthy as people are in Europe or other modern countries, but hey - let them die and decrease the surplus population!
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