Repeal and Replace and I Need A Better Title Also Trump is a Butt

Part of the reason this blog got abandoned is because I would start a writing project, get most of it done, take a break with the full intention of coming back and fixing it, but never actually following through. So basically I’m a flake and can’t finish stuff. To avoid this, I’ll be skipping the part where I take a break and come back, so you can expect to see pretty awful raw shtuff here that gets fixed whenever. Or never. Exhibit A: the crappy title. There’s a chance I'll fix it later, but it exists and that’s the important part.

MOVING ON.

I’ve got political opinions. I avoided posting them here previously because The Internet (or at least my interpretation of it) said that when writing a blog I should pick a couple things to write about and stick to them. My opinions didn’t always involve books, boobs, or boardgames, so instead of putting them here I just got drunk and yelled them at Fiancé. I think he’ll approve of me yelling them at an uncaring Internet instead so babe, this one’s for you. Anyway I’ve got boobs, so I’ll just say that qualifies. Also I’m in charge here.

First off lemme just say that I think President Elect Donald Buttfucking Trump is a repulsive morally bankrupt hatred-guzzling cock trumpet. For my entire life I’ve devoutly held the belief that, as an American patriot, the elected leader of our fair nation deserves respect regardless of my personal opinions of the guy. I criticized Bush’s actions but intentionally and devoutly avoided personal attacks on his character; I did the same with Clinton and Obama. Trump is literally throwing me into a personal quandary of self-doubt over what being a patriot actually means and whether or not I am one. Anyway. More on that later.

I’m here to talk about the movement to “Repeal and Replace” Obamacare, or The Affordable Care Act if you want to get pedantic. With a majority in Congress and an upcoming Trump presidency, the Republican Party will soon have the support it needs to carry out their long-touted threats on repealing the plan. The problem they’re running into isn’t so much the repeal part, but the replace part. I’m mildly obsessed with politics these days, so let's talk about what in the sam hill this is all about.

For Trump himself, I don’t believe replacing Obamacare was ever a huge priority during his campaign. Sure, during his speeches he said he was going to repeal Obamacare and replace it with “something terrific,” but Trump’s platform seemed to be mostly based on improving national infrastructure, lowering unemployment, reforming immigration laws, and cutting back on government interference in private markets, thereby improving the American healthcare system indirectly. Cuz trickle-down economics folks. According to his campaign website:

By following free market principles and working together to create sound public policy that will broaden healthcare access, make healthcare more affordable and improve the quality of the care available to all Americans.

Looking past the cringe-worthy lack of proofreading, this statement appears to imply that whatever this “terrific” alternative is, they haven’t fleshed it out. Sure, there’s a list of 7 mostly vague ideas on reform following this grammatical train-wreck, but the entire piece is capped off with “The best social program has always been a job” and some gibberish about those goddamn Mexicans. Who the fuck knew those bastards were so ingenious and powerful that they’re actually to blame for everything.

So if Trump isn’t the one coming up with the replacement plan, who is? Fucking everybody. Paul Ryan (Speaker of the House) came up with “Obamacare Lite,” Tom Price (Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services head) has been crafting a replacement plan for years, Mike Pence has weighed in, along with a rabble of other lawmakers. The only thing every ACA nay-sayer seems to agree on is that it needs to go but definitely notrightnow and definitely not without a replacement. The ACA caused an undeniable rise in premiums and costs to the already insured, which the ACA repealers would like to alleviate, but in the end 16 million people are now insured under the act, many of them for the first time. At least the heartless bastards are sensible enough to realize that these 16 million people won’t like them very much if they get lobbed out the front door of the insurance market headfirst like a drunk out of a cartoon bar. It’s starting to look like the “Repeal and Replace” program is shaping up to be more of a “Repeal and Delay” program, particularly since they’ve openly stated that the repeal process will begin in January and end whenever but probably nowhere near those mid-term elections, which I find pretty hilarious since the ACA’s been around for over five years now. How come y’all haven’t figured this out by now? You were okay with the system when it was broken but now that we know how important universal coverage is you’ve gotta get the rest sorted? Got it.

This is what I find so fascinating about the whole thing. Like it or not, the ACA made such a profound impact on the way our nation approaches health insurance that simply pretending it never existed isn’t an option anymore. Now, ACA repeal-replacers are faced with the challenge of having their cake and eating it too. Dumbest cliché ever, by the way. Who just has a cake? Cakes are for eating. If you need a non-eating/having-only cake, make a really gross kale one so you don’t want to eat it. Which maybe isn’t such a bad idea since your diabeetus medication ain’t gettin’ any cheaper under ButtTrump.

At any rate, mandating insurance for all Americans, outlawing denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, and those troublesome hikes in premiums are the cake bits that generated the funding pool necessary to make these plans available to many of the people who enrolled, and those resources are precisely what many of these lawmakers seek to repeal. How exactly is this replacement plan going to fund itself?

I mean, it’s not inconceivable that there’s a better way to go about making universal health insurance a reality. I read the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act;” it’s like A BAJILLION PAGES LONG. OK, technically it’s only 906 pages and I’m still not sure what spasm of masochism inspired me to actually read the damn thing, since I know jack about legal-eze and had to have smarter people explain it to me anyway and that’s not even the whole thing, but I read enough to know that it’s far from perfect. Just the fact that it’s so long speaks to it’s inefficiencies, but let’s not forget that the reason it’s so convoluted and complex to begin with. The ACA was designed to fix an extraordinarily long-running and complex problem, namely that healthcare and prescription costs in this country are ridiculous and lots of people just can’t afford basic healthcare.  While universal insurance helps alleviate the financial burden of participating in this inflated system, it doesn’t actually address all the underlying factors that caused everything to be so expensive in the first place.  I’m curious to see how a party that religiously touts the power of the free market tackles the fact that an unregulated healthcare industry is precisely what got them in this pickle to begin with.

I wish I could say I’ve got confidence in the incoming administration to navigate this endeavor with grace, reaching across the aisle for the betterment of us Americans and honest long-term reform of a broken healthcare system, but the rhetoric I’m picking up doesn’t give me much hope. None of these repeal-replacers seem to be talking about how to stop the constantly ballooning costs of prescription drugs in our country, or why MRI costs about $1080 in the US and $280 in France, or why half a million Americans with mental illness have exactly zero access to help. And yes, I understand that Obamacare didn’t fix these problems completely either, but at least it addressed them at an unprecedented scale. It sounds an awful lot like the reason the “replace” bit got tacked on the end of this repeal frenzy is because Obamacare is actually working. And why trash the whole thing when it clearly has some upsides? Because it was a Democrat’s idea? It’s got Obama’s name on it? That’s childish, boys. The only replacement I foresee is Obamacare is getting swapped out with a privatized shit show that leaves the politicians who put it in place with enough popular support to win themselves another election, while simultaneously maintaining a system of ballooning healthcare costs that gives exactly zero shits about the poor people who apparently want this system to continue running them right the fuck over.  Then again who knows; maybe they’ll all finally play nice in the same sandbox now that they’ve kicked the other kids out and can get something done. I mean, at least they don’t have themselves standing in their way like the legislators who drafted Obamacare.

There’s a pile of rich white guys in power again ladies and gentlemen, and if you think they give a single solitary fuck if you can afford your band-aids if it means giving up their fat, fat pharmaceutical paychecks you’ve got another think coming.