Caltrops - ELECTION WATCH 2016





	[quote name="Commander Tansin A. Darcos"]being ineligible for re-election, we have an open field, and currently two are running for the Republican nomination, and the putative nominee for the Democrats by a whopping lack of interest, appears to be Hillary Swank, err. I mean Hillary Clinton. What gets me sometimes is I rarely notice anything those running for office really have to offer for the general public, and most of their interest is in things the general public probably wouldn't want. Or that the hypocrisy is absolutely rank. It reminds me of the famous poster by a Tea Party supporter which read "Keep the government of of my Medicare." As one guy put it, "Where do you think Medicare comes from, the Health Care Fairy?" I mean, you can have a field day with hypocrisy on health care alone. Republicans think that the government should not get between a patient and their doctor.. <i>except</i> when it's something they don't like, such as abortion. Then they're hell-bent for leather on every big government obstruction on this particular medical procedure. So much for the sacred idea that the government should not interfere with the decision of a patient and their doctor. I mean, the Republicans were complaining about The Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"), which is essentially the same thing that Republican Mitt Romney pushed into effect in Massachusetts when he was governor there. But a lot of problems people saw - the prohibition on insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions; the fact insurance is tied to the employer for most people; the tax status of employer-provided coverage vs. personally provided coverage (employer provided is tax deductible to the employer and is not a taxable benefit to the employee, but if you buy health insurance you have to buy it with after-tax dollars); insurance companies are not allowed to offer health insurance on an interstate basis; these are all caused by government mandates, and could have been offered up for repeal as a response. But when the Republicans claimed they had an answer to the problems Obamacare allegedly "fixes," their response was nothing. And nature abhors a vacuum. The Republicans have tried dozens of times supposedly to repeal The Affordable Care Act under the standard definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again in the same way and expecting different results. And again, without offering anything new like fixing some of the problems I noted above (because it wouldn't be acceptable to some of their big-money donors and the lobbyists who pass out the <s>bribes</s> <i>campaign contributions</i> that keep them in power.) Too many of these problems are caused by existing laws that either increase the cost of medical care, protect those involved in the delivery, provsioning or payment of same from competition, and stifle innovation. [/quote]