Health Exchanges For Judaeo-Christian Values

 Four horsemen riding, riding, riding to my chamber door...
We come to kill your health care... nothing More!
Poe

I have decided to adopt this wonderful drawing as my metaphoric representation of the US Congress, for it works on so many levels. As previously mentioned, the Congress has had a tendency to act as the stable boys and grounds keepers at some hunt club frequented by the Night Breed. 

So it comes as no surprise that Republicans - being rational actors, although their rationality is tainted by a severe strain of dubious ideology - would go about reconfiguring health care and repealing the ACA (ObamaCare) in a way that is "rational"... meaning that some people (think of them like salami) will be "left behind" (think of the salami hitting the fan).

It was obvious to anybody.
They have neither the motivation nor the charity nor the brains to effect such a change, as I said previously.
http://fatherdaughtertalk.blogspot.com/2017/01/the-four-horsemen-of-individual-health.html


On health care, Republicans consider the meaning of ‘everybody’
01/18/17 09:20 AM—Updated 01/18/17 10:41 AM
By Steve Benen
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/health-care-republicans-consider-the-meaning-everybody?ref=yfp

Congressional Republicans recently conceded among themselves that they’ll “never” be able to craft a health-care reform plan that covers “as many people as Obamacare does.” No one, however, told Donald Trump.

The president-elect boasted to the Washington Post this week, “We’re going to have insurance for everybody. There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.” Trump added that Americans “can expect to have great health care…. Much less expensive and much better.”

The benchmarks, which Trump has no idea how to meet, were fairly specific: his administration is committing to universal coverage, “much lower deductibles,” and a simpler and less expensive system in which all Americans are “beautifully covered.”

Was Trump over-promising? Yes. Will he fail to meet his own goals? Definitely.

The funny part, however, is watching Republicans deal with the consequences of the incoming president’s rhetoric. BuzzFeed had this report late yesterday:

[S]ome Republicans in the Senate say they are working on repealing and replacing Obamacare under the belief that Trump misspoke.

Ah yes, the misstatement. The incoming president assured the American public that the Affordable Care Act will be repealed and replaced with a system in which “everybody” has insurance, to which GOP lawmakers are effectively responding, “Let’s assume he didn’t actually mean ‘everybody.’”

[...]

Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence Flanking the Head Horseman

Rational actors...
Very soon, the "invisible hand" of political markets will move and write

Mene, mene  tekel upharsin

In the disaster of the Republicans we will all come to grief. 

And art anticipates life again, as we note that "left behind" and "left out" are the same thing, and an imaginary moral taint will accrue to those without health care....

I mean, they must be seen as inferiors and not deserving of health care, for how else could we live with our "Judaeo-Christian" selves?

--

note:
From the same op.cit. above we see:

...All of which brings us to the larger problem of what Trump’s aides and allies do when the president-elect says something problematic or demonstrably false. As Corey Lewandowski put it a while back, voters “understood that sometimes, when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar, you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”

A member of Trump’s transition team added in December that Americans should take the president-elect’s rhetoric “symbolically,” not literally. Kellyanne Conway said last week that Americans shouldn’t necessarily “go with what’s come out of his mouth,” but rather, we should “look at what’s in his heart.”...

It is hard to know what to say when confronted by this magnitude of claptrap.

I read Mr. Lewandowski's statement as something like talk about the weather:

"Ah, yup. That there health care is mighty fine, but it is Michigan, so just wait a few minutes 'n' she'll change!  Yup."

 As for Ms. Conway's statement, it is not Mr. Trump's heart that gives us the shivers. It is the withered hearts of the Congress.