Holy Crap, Republicans don't know anything about Health Care Insurance!!!

When it rains stupidity it pours stupidity.

Breaking News: America should be waking up to the idea that Republicans don't understand health care at all, or for that matter, how insurance works.

In a breathlessly stupid number of recent comments, we're supposed to put our faith in a Republican "the time is here, the time is now" remake of health care?  

It wasn't just the Rep. Jason Chaffetz's moment either (with a great response from former Mayor Gavin Newsom), add to it Rep. Roger Marshall, (R-Kan.) comments below, a first-term congressman who spent three decades as a physician and is a member of the GOP Doctors Caucus. He said:

“There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves. Just like homeless people... I think just morally, spiritually, socially just don’t want health care.”

“The Medicaid population, which is [on] a free credit card as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising. And I’m not judging; I’m just saying socially that’s where they are. So there’s a group of people that even with unlimited access to health care are only going to use the emergency room when their arm is chopped off or when their pneumonia is so bad they get brought [to] the ER." 

What, pregnancy has something to do with guys? It's still mind boggling to think that conservative men don't connect pregnancies to guys, and the resulting "prenatal care."

Democratic Rep. Mike Doyle (Pa.) was talking with Republican Rep. John Shimkus (Ill.) about Shimkus’s objections to the Affordable Care Act’s requirements for health-insurance plans. Doyle asked Shimkus,“What mandate in the Obamacare bill does he take issue with?”

Shimkus: “What about men having to purchase prenatal care?” 

At that point, one could hear the room start to stir.

Shimkus: “I’m just . . . is that not correct? And should they?”

Paul Ryan doesn't get Insurance? True!: After all these years, you'd think Ryan would at least know a little something about insurance, since he wants to hand all our health care needs over to them. But he doesn't. He wants the government/taxpayers to pay for the sick instead of insurers? He said the following like it was something bad. Scary, Ryan doesn't get it:

Ryan: "Young and healthy people are going to go into the market and pay for the older sicker people. So the young healthy person is going to be made to buy health care and they're going to be paying for the person who gets breast cancer in her 40's, or gets heart disease in his 50's...the people who are healthy, pay for the people who are sick. It's not working and that's why it's in a death spiral." 

That's how insurance works....what in gods name is this guy inhaling? No wonder this is all so screwed up:



No, the public should not pay for the sick so insurance companies can make hefty profits. Democrats...are you there?

University of New Hampshire's Stephen Pimpare, the author of "A People’s History of Poverty in America" and the forthcoming "Ghettos, Tramps, and Welfare Queens: Down and Out on the Silver Screen," summed up nicely exactly what ails the Republican Party and their envious resentful voters:

For people like Chaffetz or Paul Ryan, this stubborn insistence that people could have more money or more health care if only they wanted them more absolves the government of having to intervene and use its power on their behalf. In this way of thinking, reducing access to subsidized health insurance isn’t cruel; it’s responsible, a form of tough love in which people are forced to make good choices instead of bad ones. This is both patronizing and, of course, a gross misreading of the actual outcome of laws like these....The implication that we should be worried by the possibility of poor people buying the occasional steak, lottery ticket or, yes, even an iPhone...Set aside the fact that a better cut of meat may be more nutritious than a meal Chaffetz would approve of, or the fact that a smartphone may be your only access to email, job notices, benefit applications, school work and so on. Why do we begrudge people struggling to get by the occasional indulgence? Why do we so little value pleasure and joy? Why do we insist that if you are poor, you should also be miserable? Why do we require penitence?

Just because what Chaffetz is saying isn’t novel doesn’t mean it isn’t uninformed and dangerous. Chaffetz, Ryan and their compatriots offer us tough love without the love, made possible through their willful ignorance of (or utter disregard for) what life is actually like for so many Americans who do their very best against great odds and still, nonetheless, have little to show for it. Sometimes not even an iPhone.