RinoCare: Good News for People Who Like Bad News

Paul Ryan's proposed healthcare bill is out. It's a steaming pile, as you might imagine. It's probably worse even than I expected, and I've already called Ryan out as the biggest traitor in politics ever. Subsidies are still there but renamed. The individual mandate is still there but renamed and penalties offset from the IRS to the insurance companies (a smart political move).  It's still a massive entitlement program that requires heavy taxation, heavy redistribution of wealth, conflates healthcare with health insurance, and doesn't address the high prices.

The bill is being dubbed RinoCare, ObamaCareLite, and ObamaCare 2.0, among other names. Some are calling it TrumpCare, but I'm not sure if that's accurate. Trump campaigned on "Repeal & Replace." This is more like "Rename & Modify." Perhaps modify doesn't signify much. No one claimed that Obamacare would never be modified. After the massive premium increases last year Democrats said that everything would be fine as long as Hillary could go in and "tweak" the legislation. Let's call it "Rename & Recess". The Republican Congressmen can shuffle things around, pass a bill that is fundamentally equivalent to Obamacare, and duck out of town before anyone in the media has time to call them racist.

Here are some handy guidelines to tell you how you should feel about this legislation.

• If you're a conservative, you should be outraged in principle, but not in practice. Make any sense? Because conservatives are in principle rooted in traditional cultural values and small government ethos but in practice tend to borrow and spend to grow the size of government. Since the government plans to spend more on healthcare and on the military you should balance out to contentment.
• If you're a liberal, you'll have to wait and see whether or not Trump supports it. Initial reactions indicate he's pushing for it, so I guess you'll need to be against it.
• If you're a libertarian, you're probably a liberal who doesn't like the government telling you what to do. Your biggest gripe should be that the individual mandate wasn't eliminated, just shuffled around.
• If you're a constitutionalist, you should oppose the bill on grounds that the 10^th Amendment has not yet been repealed.
• If you're a socialist, you should love the bill because it's a government program doomed to failure that Republicans are calling the "free-market solution" anyway. Patience Iago, PATIENCE! As soon as the whole thing collapses on itself you can scream until your lungs bleed that free-market healthcare solutions don't work.

So what if you're an alt-righter or one of those right-wing neo-reactionaries? (There's a decent chance if you follow this blog). Neo-reactionaries are certainly opposed to this kind of legislation that furthers the scope of national largess. And that's why we should support it.

Let's make an analogy. Look at Sweden. Sweden has hit peak insanity, as best as I can tell. That's not necessarily sober analysis, it may just be a lack of creativity. Just because I can't imagine how they could be much more absurd doesn't mean it isn't possible. The long-term prospects of Sweden as a culture and as a nation seem to depend on whether they can bankrupt themselves before they destroy themselves. Bankruptcy is sometimes all that stops the gambling addict, and so it may be all that ends the dangerous spiral of pathological altruism.

The brave Swedes lead the way, but the US doesn't lag terribly far behind. As far as healthcare goes, the expectation that the federal government should provide healthcare to all citizens has been established. Trump ran to replace Obamacare, not to remove national healthcare. At this point, it's practically semantics. The people demand healthcare, and politicians who refuse will find themselves sitting at home watching with the rest of us. Writing blogs, probably.

A democracy that gives universal suffrage to a generally irresponsible populace is without a doubt embarked on a slow boat to disaster. The normal tendency of inevitable disasters is the sooner the better. The longer the tectonic pressures build, the more catastrophic the inevitable earthquake. The longer the bubble inflates, the harder the crash. If you see the United States as such a disaster set in motion, then your motivations should be (1) to precipitate the collapse as soon as possible, and (2) to have yourself in the best possible position when that time comes. In general, this means to spiral the debt so high that the government is impeded in its functioning and that either default or inflation is inevitable, which would help prevent foreign debt holders from sucking all the remaining wealth out.

On healthcare, if the people demand it, that's what we'll get. So we want the plan that tends to be funded by government debt. Not taxes, and not increasing premiums and others costs. The government is largely responsible for driving up the cost of healthcare to begin with. Now they want to take over the industry entirely. Fine, let's just make sure we aren't the ones getting saddled with the cost, and that it serves our intentions of bankrupting the Fedguv sooner than later.