Thank God for Jason Chaffetz. He’s perfect. He’s such an excellent representative of the Republican party. About the fact that the Republican replacement plan for ACA is more expensive and enriches the wealthy, he says,
You know what, Americans have choices, and they’ve got to make a choice. And so maybe, rather than getting that new iPhone that they just love and want to go spend hundreds of dollars on, maybe they should invest in their own health care.
There are facts that illustrate how clueless his argument is.
According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the average premium for an individual health care plan in the United States is just over $235 per month. Buying an iPhone 7 through a wireless carrier and paying for it in installments over a two-year period costs $27 per month.
But for now, just set aside the facts — Republicans don’t care about them anyway — and savor the flawless Marie Antoinette-ness of the moment. And remember what happened to Marie.
I led with that one in my healthcare post.
:Snort: I wish. Travesty doesn’t even cover what they’ve put out there. As noted in my post, the rethugs spent 6 or 7 pages on this: ensuring lottery winners don’t have access to Medicaid.
I know, geez, some of those poor people even want refrigerators in their house, too.
A new iPhone 7 (without a payment plan) runs around $700. That’ll pay for about 3 months worth of premiums. What are they supposed to do for the other 9 months of the year?
i would wish i could get health care for one ipone a year. And i live in a country that has mandatory health insurance and governmental backed health insurance companies. Also i pay reduced rates because i am a student.
This one has the advantage of actually having happened too.
Historians generally doubt that Marie Antoinette said any such thing (she was actually rather horrified by the plight of the poor, if her personal letters to her Austrian family are anything to go by). The earliest citation is Rousseau’s Confessions, and he only attributes it to “a great Royal lady”, not Marie specifically.
Marie was a suspicious Austrian import, and unpopular, and became an excellent scapegoat following the Revolution for the excesses of the Ancien Regime. The excesses were real, but it seems a touch unfair to make her the figurehead for them.
These walking clots of vileness in the Trump coven deserve all the crap they get though, so carry on!
In fact, it probably deserves pointing out that the demonising of Marie Antoinette was the product of rampant misogyny and xenophobia in 18th century French politics. Even before the Revolution she was nicknamed “Madame Defecit”, and a popular narrative emerged that it was her lavish lifestyle (which she did lead) rather than corruption and economic mismanagement that had ruined the French economy. Blame the flamboyant foreigner’s feminine fripperies, rather than systemic injustice and vested interests.
I’m not sure this is a narrative we should be complicit in.
The number one reason for personal bankruptcy is medical expenses.
Yep, rethugs are living in their own reality. They also don’t give a shit about the poor, and congresscritters don’t really give a shit about problem at the state level, as they are dealing the states it’s up to them to deal with the problem.
not only that, but owning a cellphone has become an effective necessity.
Anyone remember who it was who reminisced about people trading chickens for health care?
Ah, turns out if you search “take a chicken to the doctor”, you learn it was Sue Lowden, Republican of Nevada. Really the only thing you can say for Chaffetz is that he’s slightly closer to the actual cost.
In the same way a chicken is slightly closer to non-avian dinosaurs than Chaffetz. However, intelligence-wise (“IQ”), the distance between him and the chicken now roasting in the oven can be used to measure the volume of the Universe as a single digit.
First I thought “235 bucks is pretty reasonable for insurance”. Then I remembered that this is probably for every single person in a household and still means huge co-pays.
I live in a country with a fucked up mix of public and private insurance. You can change into the private system if you’Re either a tenured civil servant or earn above a certain amount. But you cannot change back (except certain circumstances.) Private insurance is really nice when you are young, healthy and single and many young people make that mistake. Who wouldn’t like a few hundred bucks in their pocket in their 20s. Then they turn 50 and notice that their premiums are increasing and their income is shrinking.
My fave GOP talking point is saying that people need to have “skin in the game” when it comes to health care.
Kind of missing the fact that people have their *literal* skin in the game of health care. But the GOP is so used to talking about money they forget about physical bodies.
$235/MOnth!? HAHAHAHA! Oh wait, that’s if you’re healthy and young and don’t have any pre-existing conditions like me.
If you are me and you’re a middle aged, type 1 Diabetic, it goes up to several thousand dollars a Month if anyone will even cover you.
The great thing about healthcare in this country is that anyone who thinks it doesn’t need fixing either has gold plated insurance or has never been sick.
or objects to providing medical care to their slaves.
In fairness, Marie Antoinette may not have been that bad; in fact there is some possibility that the “brioche” quip was trumped up.
Chaffetz belongs in a tumbril. Marie Antoinette may have gone for her last ride because of the company she kept. That’s a point, because the way things are looking, there’s going to be quite a crowd at the embarcation point.
Last week I fell off a ladder and spent three hours in the emergency room before being told I was fine. That visit, though, resulted in $1500 out of pocket because my particular insurance plan has a high deductible. I’m lucky; I have a good job so I can absorb the $1500 over a couple of months, but there are an awful lot of people who just scrape by for whom $1500 would have been ruinous, especially since that’s already over and above what they pay for monthly premiums.
Time for single payer. Long overdue for single payer.
Still struggling to regain my equanimity after reading about this on CNN this morning – Chaffetz is the kind of person who almost makes me wish I still believed in Hell (self-indulgent rant ahead, feel free to skip.) In spite of working full time my Dad (my mother wasn’t in the picture) couldn’t afford health insurance – our only options for medical care were the emergency room or a free clinic that was open, IIRC, from 1 – 4 pm on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. When I started graduate school and went to a dentist for the first time, he remarked that I was missing a tooth – I told him that my Dad had pulled it out with a pair of pliers when I was 8 or 9 years old. He (my Dad, not the dentist) thought it was a baby tooth that was blocking an adult tooth from coming in – turns out he was wrong. But hey, Americans have choices, and he had to make a choice: he could either feed us or keep health insurance on us; he couldn’t afford to do both. TL;DR: Chaffetz and his ilk can go fuck themselves.
Many of you write as if “Marie” was her first name and “Antoinette” was her last name. I was taught that her first name was “Marie-Antoinette” (with a hyphen), and her last name was “de Habsbourg-Lorraine”.
Which is it?
Jean-Denis (with a hyphen)
I will concede that the person most harmed by the comparison is Marie Antoinette, who couldn’t possibly be as awful as Chaffetz.
Here are some figures on individual/family policies without subsidies.
For $235 a month, your deductibles would be through the roof. Even if you could afford the insurance, the deductibles if you got sick could punish your finances.
When I retired, the company was pushing for people to go with high-deductible plans with a health savings account. The HSA is a good idea, put money away when you are young and healthy, so it is there when you need it. For those not understanding what an HSA is, link. The tragedy is found at the end of the article where the average in the HSA is shown by age.
Definitely underfounded. So it has the same problem as funding one’s IRA. The average USian IRA is woefully underfunded. Ideally one has ten times one’s annual wages/salary when one retires.
The advantage of being a glibertarian like Ryan or Chaffetz is that you don’t want people to get anything good from Gummint. That will only make people “dependent”. The goal is to seize the reins of power, drive the thing into a ditch and walk away saying, “See, government solutions never work.”
My parents drove to the southwestern US a few years ago. At one point my dad had, as he’s had several times in the past few years, an incident of his heartbeat being too fast and erratic. He went into a hospital emergency room, had the problem taken care of, and was out the next day. If they hadn’t had traveller’s health insurance that less than 24 hour visit would have cost them 10 grand. I can only imagine what a week would have cost.
This topic talks about the French revolution, and Russia Today is talking about the anniversary of 1917 revolution. At this rate, the US is going to have its own uprising once americans have had enough. Is there really a difference between an blood line aristocracy and a corporate aristocracy?
Intransitive: “Is there really a difference between an blood line aristocracy and a corporate aristocracy?”
Yes, there is at least a chance that an aristocrat may feel guilty. Corporations are just fulfilling their “fiduciary responsibility”.
Intransitive@#23:
It’s gonna be hard to fit Exxon Mobil’s neck in the guillotine.
Corporations literally only exist to diffuse risk. L’etat ce n’est pas moi!
One of Marie Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting probably did say “Let them eat brioche” because she knew what the people who quote her don’t: That there was a law that if bakers ran out of the hard, black pain that the poor ate, they had to sell them fine, white brioche at the same price. This was to prevent them baking too much of it to make more money.
The GOP would repeal such a law first thing.
well yes there are some differences but while the US does not have titled gentry we do have both an aristocracy and corporations. It does look like that it is the former who run the latter however.
It has been a political consideration that we have not taxed or found some kind of real way to punish corporations in anyway that could be considered objectively fair and equal to the way individuals are treated. Though they are now considered by law to be as individuals.
Thus allowing the aristocracy who manage the corporations and receive the majority of the benefits from the corporate entity to shelter themselves from most of the consequences their actions .
as if they are some how above the law or outside of the law and superior to the society as a whole. Is that attitude not unlike the landed gentry who consider themselves as the personification of society and not mere members?
uncle frogy
“The great thing about healthcare in this country is that anyone who thinks it doesn’t need fixing either has gold plated insurance or has never been sick.”
Isn’t that the truth! As someone with chronic (and expensive) medical problems since childhood, I am often amazed and depressed at how many people understand nothing about health insurance, and by extension the American health care system. Including plenty of doctors! I cannot count the amount of times I have explained to a doctor the cost of the treatment they insist I must have – and the number of times they have argued with me. Look buddy, I’m right, you are wrong, and I have a much greater incentive than you to understand this!
Now that I am pushing 40, it is better, but especially when I was in my 20s, it was impossible. Everyone around me was young and healthy and just didn’t get it. Maybe politicians don’t understand because most of them are healthy? Maybe someone with a chronic/severe illness isn’t able to go through the election process and get the job?
Isn’t it funny that, when it is about abortion, Americans don’t have choices anymore?
Miss Jackson if you’re nasty.
analog2000 wrote:
From what I understand, the US congressional health insurance plan is exceptionally generous, and far less generous than the benefits offered to congressional staff.
My health insurance costs over $600 a month. That doesn’t include deductibles (one for prescriptions and one for office visits at $1000 each) or copays, which are at least $30 for basic office visits and at least that much each prescription. Then there are the medications that my insurance has simply dropped from their formulary with no explanation, and no recourse except to pay for them out of pocket.
Best case scenario, their maximum tax credit of $4000 will last me about 4 months. I’m 32. Still fairly young, but I’ve never been healthy. There was never any question of me putting money in healthcare savings account. If my family didn’t have a bit of money, I’d have died in the streets by now, ACA or no ACA.
The Republican ‘healthcare overhaul’ is nothing more than a statement of how they intend to rob and murder me. I, or rather my family, can barely afford to pay what we pay now, thanks to the (frankly insufficient) ACA. The Republican plan guarantees that the price of insurance will rise even faster than it already does. Once I run out of money (which won’t take long at all if they go through with their plan), I won’t be able to afford my medication anymore. When that happens, I will die.
The exact ‘how’ of my death is a bit up in the air. Top contenders include (but are not limited to) perforated ulcers of the esophagus, constriction of the bronchial passages, and intestinal perforation leading to sepsis. Oh, and suicide. Excruciating pain + no psych meds + no healthcare does not make for a life worth living.
I could live another 40+ years, with decent healthcare. The way things are looking now, I’ll be lucky to see 35.
I can’t claim to have done much of anything with my life. I can’t even honestly say I enjoy it, most of the time. But it is mine. I’ll be damned if I shuffle off to die in ditch just to enrich insurance company stockholders and the scum of the GOP. I may not be able to stop them from killing me, but maybe I can make them look me in the eyes while they do it.
I wonder, if people like me held a literal die-in on the steps of congress and around the Wall Street bull, would it make any difference? Or would it just give Paul Ryan a stiffy?
If you’re interested, NAMI (National Association for Mental Illness) has posted their talking points on the AHC here. Pretty scary what this shit may mean for people with mental illness. Hopefully it won’t just sail through, and get some fixes. There is some Republican resistance to some pieces of it. Per the Washington Post, even the Dumpster might oppose parts of it…hahahahaha, I need a drink.
vucodlak #32
*standing ovation*
Cross posted from the “Political Madness All the Time” thread.
The Centers for Disease Control will find their funding drastically cut if the Republican health care plan is voted into law.
NBC News link
Other uses for the prevention fund:
The prevention fund is about 12% of the CDC’s budget.
What Trump tweeted in August of 2014:
Regarding Jason Chaffetz’s clueless remarks, does he really think the cost of an iPhone equals the cost of health insurance? It does not, not even for bare bones, high-deductible insurance.
Does he really think that chemotherapy treatments are equal in cost to an iPhone?
And what planet is he living on if he thinks that it is easy for anyone in the workforce to get by without a smart phone? That’s difficult. Sometimes you need a phone just to look for a job.
Some people have to choose between food and rent, or between food and prescription medicine, or between food and bus fare to a job interview. Chaffetz is an arrogant, clueless, overly privileged asshole.
Steve Benen commented on Jason Chaffetz’s stupid remarks about the cost of health care:
What I liked about Benen’s analysis was the spotlight on a common conservative myth: the myth that poor people wouldn’t be poor if they just managed their money better; and that poor people can be forced, through legislation, to be more like Jason Chaffetz.
All too convenient excuses for destroying the safety net.
An excerpt from the AARP response to the proposed Republican health bill:
More details, and the full AARP response, are available at Talking Points Memo.
Writing for The Daily Beast, Erin Gloria Ryan points out that the Republican replacement for Obamacare is a “gigantic tax on women.”
Jason Chaffetz’s rich donors pay his Verizon bill, and they paid for his iPhone.
Slate link
I think they’re writing it as if she had two first names, or, in American terms, a “first” name and a “middle” name, like Barack Hussein Obama or Donald John Trump.
As usual in German-speaking nobility, she had more than two: Maria Antonia Josepha Johanna. I’m actually surprised she didn’t have 5 or 10; maybe such numbers are a more recent phenomenon – here’s a living example of someone with nine given names, of which the first contains a hyphen. (Freiherr is a title, “free lord”, that goes inside the name.)
vucodlak:
I’m fortunate enough to have good insurance, for now. Don’t know if I’ll be able to afford it after retirement. Even so, I have a $25.00 co-pay each visit, and no scrip coverage. If I don’t go in for spinal injections, then I don’t get scrips for pain meds. Every 3 months, I get a lumbar spinal injection, and four to six neck and shoulder injections. Those injections run $800 to $1,000 a piece. It’s a fucking joke that I could even begin to afford any of it. I can’t even afford part of it. Life without a way to control pain wouldn’t much be worth living. I tend to think the rethugs know that, and are counting on it.
I just got my healthcare bill: 230€/month, calculated on my income (and before anybody with a working knowledge of German healthcare thinks I’m rolling in dough: I got to pay it myself in full). No deductibles. Small co-pay for medication (max 10€ per prescription medicine).