Obamacare Isn't Saving Us from the Chicom Virus, and Ending It Won't Make Us Less Safe From It

I saw that the main paper in my state ran yet another highly biased wire report yesterday on the so-called "Affordable Care Act". It started by saying...

The Trump Administration touched off another politically charged battle over the future of the Affordable Care Act with its latest maneuver to dismantle the law during a pandemic — a move that Democrats lambasted and few Republicans defended.

It went on and on quoting people about how terrible it was that anyone was even considering rolling back any aspect of Obamacare while this highly infectious disease was ravaging the country. It was almost strident in sending the message that we need this nationalized healthcare plan more than ever.

They are the only state-wide newspaper and have been a primary source of information for Arkansas voters for many decades. Politicians are afraid to cross them. Thus, they must bear significant responsibility for the poor economic conditions and ongoing political corruption and dysfunction in our state. They owe us reparations, though the blame also falls on those of us who are so shallow and inept as to continue to give them credibility just because they are big and loud.

I didn't vote for Donald Trump and I have no plans to in November either. Still, the story is extremely poorly reasoned and misleading. Obamacare is the law of the land. Our healthcare infrastructure is now built around it. If America's response to the pandemic has been inadequate it must be at least in part because Obamacare isn't good at dealing with a crisis of this kind and magnitude. It is a clunky, centralized, inefficient and unwieldly administrative nightmare that was cobbled together by giving a vast array of interest groups a piece of the taxpayer pie. It wasn't even built to be a flexible and rapid response to an infectious disease, and it is consuming a vast amount of resources which could otherwise be spent on an effective response.

In fact, a strong argument can be made that the more committed a state is to Obamacare, the weaker its response has been to the crisis. Nineteen states have not enacted a critical piece of the Obamacare pie. They haven't expanded Medicaid to every healthy adult below the federal poverty line. So their health-care infrastructure isn't as centralized and ordered around Obamacare as it is in the other thirty-one states.

Now, let's look at the death-rates for the Chi-com virus by state....

I'd like to thank Alan Clark for his recent statistics on COVID-19......
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Deaths per million from COVID-19
Worst nation in the world Belgium 851 

New Jersey 1670
New York 1610
Connecticut 1210
Massachusetts 1150
Rhode Island 870
District of Columbia 850
Louisiana 680
Michigan 610
Illinois 540
Delaware 520
Maryland 520
Pennsylvania 510 

If you remove these states (the worst 12 ) from the numbers the rest of the United States has performed better than most of the world.
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What do each of these twelve states have in common? They are all among the states which expanded Medicaid. IOW these are the states which fully embraced Obamacare. If it were a matter of chance, at least four of these states should be from the group which failed to expand Medicaid, instead, none of them are. If there is any relationship between how well a state has dealt with the COVID-19 crises and degree of integration of Obamacare then it is an inverse relationship. The more a state integrated it's health-care system with Obamacare the less likely it is that they had a lower death-rate from the illness.

The biggest problem early on in America was that testing was far too slow. This produced chaos in our early response because no one could tell if they were infected or not. This too was a result of an overly-centralized healthcare delivery system. In this case, early on the CDC insisted that all testing would go through them. The centralized response slowed things down and it wasn't until things were out of hand that they threw in the towel and let a decentralized approach to testing resolve the problem. Would that have been more likely or less likely to have been the case without Obamacare imposing a centralized, if clunky, healthcare system on the nation?

Government has a legitimate role in stopping the spread of highly infectious diseases. There is no evidence to support the belief that Obamacare is the best way, or even a good way, to do that. We don't need Obamacare to protect us from COVID-19, and there is evidence to suggest that we could do better without it.


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Books by Mark Moore

Founder of BET Says Black Lives Matter Should Start Their Own Political Party

Based on his conclusion that the Democrats have taken the black vote for granted.

This is the logical conclusion of identity politics. Each identity gets their own political party to leverage their interests. I support more parties, including the right to have this one. But my preference would be that the parties would be focused on competing ideas about how to govern, not competing interest groups fighting for a bigger share of government loot. The Democrat party may have been playing with fire when it built its coalition around identity politics. The Republicans are repulsive for different reasons.

Either way, if America is going to collectivism and group-identity then more parties is still less-worse than those same things in a two party system. Ultimately though, free thinking persons of every color and political persuasion are now in a struggle for their right to retain their identity as individual persons rather than be seen purely as members of a set of groups. The left has their collectivism, and so does the right (remember fascism, it didn't die in the Furherbunker). I demand the right to think, speak and live outside the societal expectations of the sum total of the groups I am assigned without collectivist retribution from either side.

I do notice that most of the protestors at BLM events are not black, so this party could count on some outgroup support for a while.

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If you are mentally healthy enough to sleep well at night even if people you have never met living in a city you have never been to are doing things that you don't approve of, then Localism may be the philosophy of government for you.

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Big Corporations, Not Cops, Have a License to Kill

PG&E just pled guilty to killing 84 people in California. The company was repeatedly warned that its faulty equipment was going to start a wildfire. In 2018 their equipment did start a fire- resulting in the deaths of scores of innocent people and destroying the small town of Paradise, California. The company was still on "probation" for a 2010 fire that killed eight people. That fire was caused by an explosion of one of their transformers.

The company's President appeared in court and confessed to 84 counts of manslaughter on behalf of his company. Nothing happened to him, or any other executive of PG&E. His company was assessed with fines. They were huge fines, but the company is paying them. There isn't a single real human being who is being held legally accountable for the reckless decisions which resulted in the deaths of eighty-four innocent people. Not even a $10 fine.

Look, I don't approve of police using excessive force. It is unfortunate that persons resisting arrest are sometimes killed while being taken into custody. If a policeman abuses his authority with malice aforethought, of course he should be held legally accountable for it. Even if they kill someone in custody by gross negligence, they should still be held accountable. And by and large, they are. While the media is getting us in an uproar about a legitimate problem, but one that does often get addressed when it occurs. What the media is mostly ignoring is a much larger problem that is baked into the cake of our system. Large corporations have a license to kill. 

The PG&E management whose decisions killed 84 people won't pay any legal price for their actions. Corporations have gotten too big. They have more access to our government than real flesh-and-blood citizens do. The laws are written by their lobbyists and voted in by politicians whose campaigns are funded by them, running on a party label which is financed by them. No wonder that same government bails out Wall St. over Main St. 100-1. And it will continue to do so, passing the crushing debt to do so onto our children. That's why FEDGOV shouldn't have the power to bail out anyone.

This is an issue on which left, right, and the middle can all agree on. Corporations, themselves a creature of government, are too powerful. The people who run them are too powerful. The biggest are basically immortal, and overtime more wealth is being transferred from the middle class to them. When they mess up, the are bailed out. If we mess up, or even experience misfortune beyond our control, we lose our homes. They make our laws, they loot our kids, and now they take our lives with impunity. The principle of incorporation as a shield for legal consequences has been taken too far. Localism has very specific ways of dealing with the problem of corporatism, and the other twelve ways that control of our lives is systematically taken from us and handed to ever more distant capitol cities. 

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