Gas Bandit's Political Thread V: The Vampire Likes Bats

DarkAudit

DarkAudit

Let me throw another little hypothetical at you.

A family is paying off a mortgage when the father dies suddenly of a heart attack. The life insurance on the loan pays it off.

Twenty years later, an error by the power company after a storm burns said house down. The insurance pays off some of the home and personal property losses. The family moves across town and has to take out a new mortgage. Mother retires, but the mortgage is paid automatically from the pension every month.

Another ten years later. Mother's physical condition deteriorates to where she is now in a nursing home awaiting surgery. There is hope she may come home some day, but will there be a home? The nursing home payments aren't fully covered by long term care insurance. So the mortgage goes on the back burner. The rest of the family faces losing everything in spite of working a full-time (and then some) job.

But hey, they don't have a RIGHT to that care or that home! So what if you've got people ruining their own health trying to avert disaster! The system fucking works!
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
DarkAudit said:
What I remember is "you only have the right to as much health care as you can afford," as your mantra. By that standard, the middle class and below can get fucked in case of catastrophic illness or injury, hmm? Need chronic long-term care that costs five times your yearly salary per month? Too bad.

And that was before the ACA. After that I wasn't having to look at monthly premiums taking a third of my paycheck or more. Someone working full time should not have to decide between health insurance and food. Before the ACA I was doing exactly that.
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The context of that quote was in reference to, in the debate of the time, people erroneously calling health care a right. Health care is not a "right." You do have the right to all the health care you can afford, same as you have the right to all the food you can afford. Same as you have the right to all the guns you can afford - and owning a gun IS a right, yet nobody is clamoring for the government to subsidize the price of firearms.

But what has really happened to you is that, in a situation where health care was too expensive for you, rather than address the root causes of health care being ridiculously expensive and working to make it more affordable, the government (or at least one party of it) bought you by picking up the tab for yours - with other people's money, not to put too fine a point on it.

DarkAudit said:
Let me throw another little hypothetical at you.

A family is paying off a mortgage when the father dies suddenly of a heart attack. The life insurance on the loan pays it off.

Twenty years later, an error by the power company after a storm burns said house down. The insurance pays off some of the home and personal property losses. The family moves across town and has to take out a new mortgage. Mother retires, but the mortgage is paid automatically from the pension every month.

Another ten years later. Mother's physical condition deteriorates to where she is now in a nursing home awaiting surgery. There is hope she may come home some day, but will there be a home? The nursing home payments aren't fully covered by long term care insurance. So the mortgage goes on the back burner. The rest of the family faces losing everything in spite of working a full-time (and then some) job.

But hey, they don't have a RIGHT to that care or that home! So what if you've got people ruining their own health trying to avert disaster! The system fucking works!
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That is a direct fallacious appeal to emotion and, I strongly surmise, not a little "hypothetical." It still goes back to my previous point, along with some other questions I'd raise about why the family's insurance paid off the first house instead of the power company's insurance, and furthermore why it only paid off the mortgage and didn't replace the equity so that it could go toward a new house.

It's a hard road to hoe, I won't deny. But I'd ask this "theoretical" family too, why government plunder is the only solution for their problems - why they are entitled to the time, sweat and earnings of other people - taken from them at de facto gunpoint. The answer is, they don't care if they are or not. They're desperate - understandably so. And the government is all to happy to exploit that desperation to buy another few serfs. And I get to sit here and look like I'm murdering santa claus because I'm objective.
 
DarkAudit

DarkAudit

GasBandit said:
questions I'd raise about why the family's insurance paid off the first house instead of the power company's insurance, and furthermore why it only paid off the mortgage and didn't replace the equity so that it could go toward a new house.
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You missed the 20 years later part. The insurance was on the original home loan. The house was already long since paid off by the time of the fire.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
DarkAudit said:
You missed the 20 years later part. The insurance was on the original home loan. The house was already long since paid off by the time of the fire.
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But why would your insurance be on the hook when it was the power company's fault? Should not the power co been on the hook for the full value of what was lost?

You know what though, all this is academic or irrelevant.

What's important is, you're in a really rough spot, and I feel for you, I really do. Even if I don't agree with Obamacare and how it came about and why, the last thing I'd ever want to see is yet another rug pulled out from under you. The reason I call it a "barbed" hook is because a barb does even more damage getting yanked out than being pushed in. As I said in 2010, I didn't think that there could be any republican stupid enough to try to yank that barb once it was in. Of course, when I said that... Donald Trump wasn't in politics.

If it were up to me, I'd have left that hook in. I recognized, and still do, that even if I don't agree with it and think it was done with duplicity, the country has made its choice, both on this subject and others related, about what kind of place we're to become going forward. For all my railing, I recognize that single payer is an inevitability and am resigned to being a minority opinion for the rest of my life - because I don't think I'll change my mind. But for the sake of you and those in situations like yours, I'd not have wished this grenade's shrapnel on you.
 
blotsfan

blotsfan

Do not, my friends, become addicted to healthcare. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!*


*I assume I'm far from the first to make this joke.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

GasBandit said:
in a situation where health care was too expensive for you, rather than address the root causes of health care being ridiculously expensive and working to make it more affordable, the government (or at least one party of it) bought you by picking up the tab for yours - with other people's money, not to put too fine a point on it.
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You know, I don't think I ever thought about comparing health care pricing to the Gillette model until now.[DOUBLEPOST=1493996640,1493996193][/DOUBLEPOST]
blotsfan said:
Do not, my friends, become addicted to healthcare. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!*
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I know you're referencing Fury Road (even if I did have to Google it), but really it reminds me more of the gallows scene from Hang 'Em High. Maybe someone will remake this speech that same way.

--Patrick
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
blotsfan said:
Do not, my friends, become addicted to healthcare. It will take hold of you, and you will resent its absence!*


*I assume I'm far from the first to make this joke.
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It'd actually be an apt metaphor to government control of health care.

The water is hard to get to. But rather than figure out a way to remove the actual obstruction, Joe (the "government" of the Citadel) decides to become its gatekeeper. It becomes the provider (and rationer) of water so that the populace - most especially the poor - becomes utterly dependent on him. Naturally, he and his cronies are not beholden to the same limitations. He builds a cult around himself to continue perpetuation of his power.

"Do not become addicted to water" becomes "Maybe you're better off taking a painkiller and forgoing surgery." Man, if it was any more on the nose, I'd almost think it intentional.
 
blotsfan

blotsfan

Ah so you're saying that rather than charging expensive prices, doctors should do their job out of decency for their fellow man and in return other people could help them out.

I gotta say, I wasn't expecting you to advocate a communist revolution but I can dig it.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
blotsfan said:
Ah so you're saying that rather than charging expensive prices, doctors should do their job out of decency for their fellow man and in return other people could help them out.
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Of course not. But you're perfectly aware of that, and just making a funny :p

But to continue the metaphor, what if Joe had, instead, commissioned multiple, smaller, hand-worked water pumps? Thus, people had access to water when they needed it, retrieving what they needed by their own toil? And if someone was too weak to work the pump, someone could much more easily help them out because the cost and effort were much lower.

But unfortunately, ever since world war two, multiple generations were conditioned to take for granted that getting their water was someone else's responsibility - either their employer, or the government. Thus, they grew to stop caring about the cost of effort to bring water to the surface, and an entire middleman industry sprang up which made more money the more expensive water got. And now anyone without "water insurance" risks bankruptcy.
 
Hailey Knight

Hailey Knight

When do I get money back from the government for stuff I didn't want to fund with my taxes? cause I was fine with my taxes paying for others' healthcare, but I'm guessing the same chunk of my paycheck will go missing every two weeks whether my taxes go to that or something else. Where's my refund from Trump's weekend getaways?
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
blotsfan said:
And if no one comes around to help them, they die.
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Maybe in whatever sickass dystopian post-apocalyptic wasteland citadel YOU come from, but in MY sickass dystopian post-apocalyptic wasteland citadel, people are asses-to-elbows and ain't nobody gonna go unnoticed.
 
Gruebeard

Gruebeard

GasBandit said:
Maybe in whatever sickass dystopian post-apocalyptic wasteland citadel YOU come from, but in MY sickass dystopian post-apocalyptic wasteland citadel, people are asses-to-elbows and ain't nobody gonna go unnoticed.
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Huh. In my sickass dystopian post-apocalyptic wasteland citadel, it's just me and my harem.


Wait, that's not very dystopian. Let me try again.


In my sickass dystopian post-apocalyptic wasteland citadel, it's just me and my 30 wives.



:hide:
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
So Macron was pretty much set to beat LePen. And then. 2 days before the election, massive hacked email dump from his campaign. While most emails are real, there are apparently a number of fake emails littered in it to sew concern/doubt. A number of them are identifiable as having really bad French. Some of them are just clearly false, like one saying he raped and murdered an underage girl.

Here's where the timing gets really interesting. France has a media blackout on elections 2 days before the vote. So actual news agencies can't cover this and talk about what's real and what's not. All that's left is social media.

So here we have someone, quite likely a foreign government, and...let's be honest a very decent chance it's Russia, fucking with another election to try and put in another extremist nationalist.

Disturbing to say the least.
 
Necronic

Necronic

Staff member
Hopefully this is transparent enough that it won't swing the election. And a year ago I would have assumed it wouldn't work.
 
Gruebeard

Gruebeard

Necronic said:
So here we have someone, quite likely a foreign government, and...let's be honest a very decent chance it's Russia, fucking with another election to try and put in another extremist nationalist.

Disturbing to say the least.
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If this was a James Bond movie, Dr Noooooo! would have infiltrated the Kremlin in order to manipulate Alexandre Putine into rigging the US Election to bring his phishing buddy, Lord Dampnuts into power.

Dr Noooooo! then gets Lord Dampnuts to take the world to the brink of nuclear annihilation by taunting this decade's go-to villain, North Korea. That's where James Bond comes in. Britain sends him into North Korea to de-escalate the tensions by sabotaging Korea's nuclear testing. He succeeds, of course, but while doing so he encounters a French spy (a 20 year old buxom French spy, of course) and together they discover the plot twist.

North Korea was a decoy! Dr Nooooo!'s agents are controlling Kim Jung Yum just as they control Putine and Lord Dampnuts. The nuclear threat was just a ploy to keep French Intelligence distracted while Dr Nooooo!'s patsy, Lord Dampnuts, gets the NSA to hack Maurice "le Rocket" Macaron's emails and rig the election in favor of his vile opponent, LePencil.

Bond must race from Korea to France to stop Dr Nooooo!'s dastardly plan. Because there's no telling what great evil Dr Noooo! could unleash if he has France under his control!
 
blotsfan

blotsfan

GasBandit said:
Maybe in whatever sickass dystopian post-apocalyptic wasteland citadel YOU come from, but in MY sickass dystopian post-apocalyptic wasteland citadel, people are asses-to-elbows and ain't nobody gonna go unnoticed.
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But as a strong person, why should I help a weaker person get the water? That will just encourage them to not be stronger. Better to let them suffer.
 
@Li3n

@Li3n

GasBandit said:
Of course not. Not even all christians do.
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If they did, you wouldn't need healthcare / health insurance in the 1st place.

I mean it's nice and all to say voluntary charity will take care of X, but then when it doesn't you have more homelessness and more people dying, and less social stability...
 
Dei

Dei

I mean, you can see it with GoFundMe, it takes a lot of yelling or a cute kid to actually get charity. Charity in and of itself is not going to cut it for most people. An every man for himself mentally needs to break down in a functioning society, especially one in which interdependency is such an intertwined aspect.

That said, I didn't really feel like Obamacare was the right direction either. The necessity of insurance to "control" soaring costs is in and of itself a huge problem. But we are never, at this point, as a society, going to say "Wow, this really isn't working right, maybe we should dismantle it down to it's root and see if we can rebuild it to be more efficient." Well, not short of flat out revolt, or, I suppose, the indifference of a society that is sick of politics and no longer pays attention to what's going on in our government as they try to strip down checks and balances.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Dei said:
I mean, you can see it with GoFundMe, it takes a lot of yelling or a cute kid to actually get charity.
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I tell you what, I'd be a lot more disposed towards charity if only I routinely had anything left over after making ends meet.

--Patrick
 
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