Ironic shred.
The Atlantic Discovers a Responsibility to Pay for Strangers’ Health Care
In quite possibly the dumbest thing the long-running mag has ever published, two Obamacare supporters declare it is an “individual responsibility” to pay for more health care insurance than an individual wants or needs so that the health care industry may cost-shift as it sees fit.
What Einer Elhauge and Kevin Caves mean to say — or are afraid to — is that the status quo health cartel is unsustainable so long as individuals have any degree of choice in their treatments or how they pay for them.
Absent a closed system which mandates levels of treatment (via “coverage” mandates) and sets prices, the day is soon coming when any individual with cash in their pockets will be able to flip the medical power structure on its head. This is because the cartel has sold its soul over the decades for easy access to government entitlement funds and third-party reimbursement checks.
But as baby-boomers — the most indifferent over-consumers of health care services in the history of man — die off, that gravvy-train will hit its last stop. Hence the bipartisan rush to “solve” health care, ie, lock in current rates of compensation and control.
Elhauge, Caves et al are welcome to make utilitarian arguments that the continuation of the current system by almost any means results in the best possible outcome for the largest number of people. This might even be a wildly popular position to take, who knows?
But it is patently absurd — and more than a little disingenuous — to cloak such calculations in notions of rights and responsibilities.
Then again, America’s elites just cannot resist telling the proles what they should be doing.
Why Do Democrats Hate Farmers?
Earlier today an amendment proposed by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) that would have prevented Food and Drug Administration agents from carrying guns and from raiding farms without warrants, was voted down on the Senate floor by 78 senators. These 15 senators, meanwhile, supported the amendment. Not a single one is a Democrat:
Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)
John Boozman (R-AR)
Jim Coburn (R-OK)
John Cornyn (R-TX)
Mike Crapo (R-ID)
Jim DeMint (R-SC)
Mike Johanns (R-NE)
Ron Johnson (R-WI)
Mike Lee (R-UT)
Rand Paul (R-KY)
Jim Risch (R-ID)
John Thune (R-SD)
Pat Toomey (R-PA)
David Vitter (R-LA)
Roger Wicker (R-MS)
Can’t… stop… laughing.
Quick, Ask Anyone Under 15 What This Thing Might Be
Even though the cassette tape is long gone from music store shelves, there’s still enough nostalgia for the old medium that it may never die. From mixtape websites that let you share a handful of songs, to this utterly fantastic giant wooden cassette coffee table.
Alabama Beer Wars Update.
Interesting but even beer cannot “create” disposable income. Let’s not overpromise, gang.
Why is torch-bearing Lemmy straddling a pine cone whilst hoisting a pint?
What if, on Memorial Day, we remember times that were more free than today? What if, on Memorial Day, when we think of those who died for our freedom, we end up recognizing that the freedom they died for is dying? What if it becomes fashionable for the government to ignore the Constitution? What if the Constitution dies because the government stops following it? What if, next Memorial Day, freedom is just a memory?
So true.
