It's Time to Make Healthcare More American
The GOP really wanted to repeal the Affordable Care Act. They wanted it bad, like Gollum and the One Ring bad. Repealing Obamacare is their precious. They haven’t shut up about it for the past 7 years but now that they control both chambers of Congress as well as the White House they can’t figure out how to “get ‘er done”. Turns out, Republicans have no palatable ideas for health care reform. I’m just as shocked as you.
Their spectacular failure has left a lot of people searching ways to fix a system that’s been broken for decades. Single-payer is now visible through the Overton window and that has progressives salivating like a dog in a sausage factory. As is always the case, I have enjoyed seeing a lot of reasoned debate and well informed discussion taking place on social media about this hot-button issue. For instance, this gem has time traveled all the way from 2009 to make the rounds again:
Damn right. Every poor person I know spends thousands of dollars a month on tattoos and beer. And lobster, of course. Unless a poor person is living in a tin shed and using discarded soda bottles for air conditioning then they are clearly spending too much money on luxuries. If you treat their ruptured appendix for free they won’t learn anything.
The allure of single-payer type health care schemes rests on the frightening notion that someone’s life might be valuable even if they are lazy or make bad financial decisions. That’s clearly ridiculous but the worst part is that socialized medicine leads to longer wait times for people whose lives actually have worth.
Making people who have money wait a little bit longer just so someone without money doesn’t die is un-American. If the GOP wants to reform health care, they need to make it more America, not less American. I have a few modest proposals for achieving that goal.
Free McDonald’s apple pie for everyone who buys health insurance
What’s more American than McDonald’s and apple pie? Combine the two and you have a delicious pocket of high fructose corn syrup and freedom. Instead of those communist Obamacare premium subsidies we should create a market-based incentive by giving a free McDonald’s apple pie to everyone who purchases health insurance. If we do this I predict the insurance market will be stabilized by the end of the week.
Doctors should prioritize patients based on net-worth
Time is money. The more money you have the more your time is worth. A poor person’s time, like their life, is worth very little. So making a rich person wait just as long as a poor person for medical care basically means you’re charging the rich person more. That’s not fair! When someone who has a lot of money goes to the doctor, they should get to go straight to the head of the line so they can get back to yachting or shopping for monocles or whatever the fuck it is they do with their time.
Deregulate the internal organ market
Did you know that it’s a violation of federal law to sell an organ? This is just the sort of overreaching Big Government regulation that is strangling innovation in health care. It’s also another example of how regulation keeps poor people poor. Internal organs are some of the most valuable assets a poor person has. Those organs are their property and it’s wrong for the nanny state to prevent poor people from selling their property.
Figure out how to involve guns and baseball
Guns and baseball are super American. So why aren’t they involved in health care? Probably because the bureaucrats in Washington lack imagination.
Bring competition back to health care
Letting poor people die in the street when they get sick might be rationally justified but it’s bad for our national brand. If we want to retain our image as a morally just society we’ve got to find a way for the worthless among us to go to the doctor.
Lucky for us I’ve found the answer in science fiction. In an episode of the brilliant BBC television series Black Mirror, titled Fifteen Million Merits, average people spend their days pedaling stationary bikes to generate electricity. Those who are not fit enough for the bikes provide entertainment for those who are by participating in humiliating and hilarious game shows. I suggest we adopt a similar approach for providing healthcare to those who can’t afford their medical bills.
I think a weekly televised “winner gets antibiotics” style battle royal would be a great way to make people on the lower rungs of society more useful. Instead of getting a handout they’d be earning their care by providing valuable entertainment to society. This is just the thing we need to bring competition back to the health care market. And hey, we could easily incorporate baseball bats and guns into this solution.
Problem solved.