30 March 2012

Oops

Dear Dr. Bones,

Once again it has seemed better to the Holy Ghost and to ourselves not to dispatch in cold blood what was writ in exuberance. Moreover, in this particular case, there is at least a little doubt about exactly what the stimulator of it all was in fact up to when he scribbled

Still thinking that lack of public option is the undoing of this version of health care reform.

If all un-enrolled persons were presumed to be covered at least by Medicare, and that in order to receive care at the point of service, an uninsured person had to claim an enrollment, in either a private or public (Medicare) plan, with a schedule of benefits (and penalties) for not having the coverage ahead of time, then I think a mandate would stand.

Why? Because at the point of service they would have to elect an enrollment, this if they had procrastinated earlier against choosing, were incapable for one reason or another, were too cheap to buy, too poor, or too inclined to mumble `Fuck the man’ all the time. Try saying that when you can’t understand what that pain is in your gut, or when you break a leg on a sheet of ice in your driveway.

This is not a lot different than the basic presumption that a person who shows up at a hospital must be cared for. It just structures it in terms of personal responsibility — the decision at the hospital to claim either a Medicare membership, private insurance membership — or I suppose the cash liability, would be a personal election.

I don’t see how this would be a government intrusion at this point and I think a mandate would stand because it would rely, ultimately, on a choice by an individual.

Merely caring for the uninsured and then floating those costs across an inefficient bureaucracy without structuring the delivery of that care, ie not allowing the uninsured the presumption to join Medicare as a last resort, is irresponsible. And it really is a status quo that is being preserved by the enormous business interests in health care that want to contain the bargaining power of the the biggest player at the table.

I don’t agree with the reflexive business paranoia that opening up Medicare to elective enrollment would be a threat to private providers. Better care, better service and the cache of a premium plan as one’s employment climbs the economic ladder, or is negotiated, would keep plenty of insurers in business.

That insurers were able to dismiss or reject claimants for `pre-existing conditions’ for so long should be a national embarrassment.

I remain extremely disappointed that Obama abandoned the public option, really without a fight; and I think it might be the undoing of what he did get accomplished by being too-cute-by-half with the adoption of a pro-business, Republican model, which must have seemed like the perfect way to pass the bill.
surfcaster @ Wed 28 Mar 8:37 PMStill thinking that lack of public option is the undoing

Still thinking that lack of public option is the undoing of this version of health care reform.

If all un-enrolled persons were presumed to be covered at least by Medicare, and that in order to receive care at the point of service, an uninsured person had to claim an enrollment, in either a private or public (Medicare) plan, with a schedule of benefits (and penalties) for not having the coverage ahead of time, then I think a mandate would stand.

Why? Because at the point of service they would have to elect an enrollment, this if they had procrastinated earlier against choosing, were incapable for one reason or another, were too cheap to buy, too poor, or too inclined to mumble `Fuck the man’ all the time. Try saying that when you can’t understand what that pain is in your gut, or when you break a leg on a sheet of ice in your driveway.

This is not a lot different than the basic presumption that a person who shows up at a hospital must be cared for. It just structures it in terms of personal responsibility — the decision at the hospital to claim either a Medicare membership, private insurance membership — or I suppose the cash liability, would be a personal election.

I don’t see how this would be a government intrusion at this point and I think a mandate would stand because it would rely, ultimately, on a choice by an individual.

Merely caring for the uninsured and then floating those costs across an inefficient bureaucracy without structuring the delivery of that care, ie not allowing the uninsured the presumption to join Medicare as a last resort, is irresponsible. And it really is a status quo that is being preserved by the enormous business interests in health care that want to contain the bargaining power of the the biggest player at the table.

I don’t agree with the reflexive business paranoia that opening up Medicare to elective enrollment would be a threat to private providers. Better care, better service and the cache of a premium plan as one’s employment climbs the economic ladder, or is negotiated, would keep plenty of insurers in business.

That insurers were able to dismiss or reject claimants for `pre-existing conditions’ for so long should be a national embarrassment.

I remain extremely disappointed that Obama abandoned the public option, really without a fight; and I think it might be the undoing of what he did get accomplished by being too-cute-by-half with the adoption of a pro-business, Republican model, which must have seemed like the perfect way to pass the bill.

surfcaster @ Wed 28 Mar 8:37 PM
To which Paddy McTammany was moved to reply

All the local Esq.’s seem to be busy not answering the fascinating legal questions

(( fold here ))

which Ernie-never-near-the-MTA about "Honest Graft in the Age of Ortiz," so you’ll have to put up with an ignorant lay sheep bleating that none of this has any bearing on whether the mandate was constitutional.

Except maybe proleptically: once Five of Nine have struck the obamanation down and vindicated the True Freedumb of Trade and of the Individual, it would be logical, as sheep and philosophers rather than the shyster community think of ‘logic’, for Themselves to go on eventually to question whether it be not equally impermissible for the Fedguv to insist on, ‘mandate’, Joe Reckless (not to mention Don José Indocumentado) getting emergency-room treatment merely because he might perish without it.

Somebooby or another on (I think) N.P.R. got close enough to this particular baloney the other day for Paddy McTammany to jump the rest of the way. It was presented as a point that might have been put to Neocomrade Associate Justice Á. G. Scalia, presumably as bein’ foremost amongst the Five, ‘intellectualfoundation’wise. Rather like certain goodvolks from Somerville, though, the baloney salesman assumed that his freelordship would not be willin’ "to be OPENLY such a skunk as that" [1]--as if Don Ántoninoe could be skunked into lettin’ Obamamcare by instead of egged on to tackle an outragously unwarranted interference with the conduct of secret-sector specuvestor-funded medical facilities.

Both _quâ_ Republicanine an’ _quâ Juris Doctor_, Neocomrade Justice Scalia strikes me as eggable on. Faction shouts "¡No more Mr. Nice Guy!" at his freelordship, an’ Ms. Jurisprudentia whispers (by comparison) that She has no use for the bleeding-heart muddlehea equity of Somerville. True Freedumb of Commerce and of the Individual, as manifestly original-intented by Mr. Madison and the Gang of Eighty-Seven, is not to be delimited by the likes of Mr. Nice Guy an’ Freedame Nasty.

_¡Fiat Constitutio, ruat cœlum!_

(( ... ))

___
[1] That’s St. George of Orwell on Mr. Saintsbury in Wigan Pier, the skunkery consisting in "As for the insane doctrine that being born in a country gives some right to the possession of the soil of that country, it hardly requires notice."

Here in the holy Homeland™, of course, Psocialism has never yet advanced to the point of US not noticing a little thing like that. _¡Amerika, du hast es [anders]!_

(( Freelord Saintsbury’s soil-possession point may soon be topical. Correctly or not, ’tis easy to imagine the discovery or invention of "hydraulic fracturing" leading to the next Great American Landboom. Our Landbooms, by the way, ought to be numbered like our Awakenin’s, for the convenience of foreigners and/or students. ))

As you see, sir, I fell into the sandtrap of _prætermissio præcox_, first dismissing the topic of how attorneys think as opposed to how realvolks emote, but then talking more about it than about anything else.

Worse, Paddy undoubtedly confused E-comrade ‘surfcaster’with that junior WhightGuard birdgal, Freedame Seascrape, "Person #4034: 59 Posts." [1] Her freeladyship can have no more use for single-payer schemes of public medicine than Count Dracula for a garlic frappe.

Happy days.
--JHM

_____
]1] The Staff & Management of the Great Blue E-Hill ought to have a word with their nerds, for I fear ‘surfcaster’, despite four posts and three uplifted thumbs, before I added mine, somehow remains persona non numerata.

The earliest sign of him appears to be 6 January 2011, whereas her freeladyship was presentin’ the whightist perspective on the "Green Economy Boondoggle" as long ago as 17 March 2009. Despite that being The Big Day, her freeladyship did not mention Paddy McTammany’s beatific eponym, appealin’ to no higher authority than "Rebecca Lindland, auto analyst with IHS Global Insight [who barked in the _Los Angeles Times_] “¿But shouldn’t it be more about satisfying the needs of the American consumer?”

Definitely not the same person, then. Her freeladyship has very concisely outlined SeascrapeCare:

My $27B health plan
seascraper | Wed, Aug 5, 2009 8:11 PM EST

(Will there be a teabagger contingent? Will there be a pro-reform contingent? - promoted by Charley on the MTA)

Just buy health insurance for all uninsured Americans. $27 billion.

A pity Don Ántoninoe an' the gang do not take hypothetical questions, for I have my doubts about the Fedguv constituionality of that one.

In any case, her freeladyship pretends to far more savin’s than there would actually be: our noble Corporate Citizennesses would no doubt manage to weasel out of a great many policy commitments, leavin’ poor Uncle Sam--¿who else?--to pay for lots and lots of quackery after the fact, over and above the premiums beforehand.

Though this brainwave does establish her freeladyship as a model Chambermaid of Commerce, I don't think it does much more than tell us which team ‘seascraper’ is rootin’ for.


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