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Irredeemable 

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Clarissa

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I truly, honestly can’t understand how you can say such a thing and live with yourself: 

Mulvaney said he believed in helping to provide “a safety net so that if you get cancer you don’t end up broke,” but separated those situations from others he termed “ordinary healthcare,” what he described as the heart of the debate.
He continued, “That doesn’t mean we should take care of the person who sits at home, eats poorly and gets diabetes.”

There’s something so deeply damaged about this fellow that I have no name for it. What makes one want to appoint oneself a judge and an executioner of some poor diabetic? 

12 responses to “Irredeemable ”

  1. Evelina Anville Avatar
    Evelina Anville

    I agree. Its disgusting. Sociopath. (And I don’t use that word lightly.)

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  2. Vic Crain Avatar
    Vic Crain

    OK, I suspect the source took the statement out of context, but I agree that the statement itself is incomprehensibly stupid. The way to reduce costs in healthcare is through ordinary healthcare. Checkups/screenings which detect early stage disease massively reduce the cost of treatment.

    Diabetes is a poor example for him to pick. Type 1 is largely driven by genetics, not eating habits. Type II requires education — people need to know what to do to take care of themselves — and cutting funds for education and public health services doesn’t help.

    One of the many problems in US government is treating each area as a silo, instead of realizing that different areas are interconnected. However, understanding complexity seems to be beyond the capacity of most members of Congress.

    (Did you see the Mark Twain graphic/quote on one of my recent posts? Very appropriate.)

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      What bugs me is the idea that if a person gets ill because of the way he lives his life, he doesn’t deserve health care. We will all start experiencing health issues at some point. And it will be the result of our lives or our ancestors’ lives. Nobody will live forever. There is no place for judgment here.

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  3. xykademiqz Avatar
    xykademiqz

    I read somewhere that conservatives genuinely believe that health insurance is like home or car insurance, i.e., there to pay only for catastrophic events. What this fellow calls “ordinary care” (which includes your kids’ physicals, recurrent ear infections, labor and delivery) they believe everyone should just pay out of pocket, you know, like you take your car to get the oil changed. Or something. To continue the stupid metaphor, shame on you for having poor luck and having no money, because it surely is your fault that the brand new car you bought is a lemon (like that never happens) so you have to pay for “ordinary service” all the time.

    This is evil and incredibly detached from reality. Ordinary care is most of the care; it makes sure we actually have healthy new generations and is very expensive in the aggregate. With my first child, there was some glitch with insurance, and for a while they kept trying to bill me as if I had been uninsured. This was 17 years ago and the cost of an uneventful labor and delivery, with 2 days in the hospital, would have been $12k if uninsured — for a condition that’s not even an illness (so the likes of this fellow can’t argue I didn’t take care of my health, ffs).

    Holding this view of the world where people are sorted according to their worthiness and virtue into those who deserve to live and those who do not is pure evil. What makes it even scarier is that these disposable people are your next-door neighbors, people with names and faces with whom you work and your kids go to school, and you just want to leave them to die because you deem them unworthy.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      That’s exactly it. This need to deliver a verdict to an ailing neighbor. A normal person wouldn’t enjoy doing something like that.

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    2. Shakti Avatar
      Shakti

      I read somewhere that conservatives genuinely believe that health insurance is like home or car insurance, i.e., there to pay only for catastrophic events.

      That is not a genuine belief. Deny a conservative man erection drugs and penis pumps through his insurance or his doctor and watch him scream in outrage. An inability to obtain an erection needs to be fixed and paid for by you and all the other people in the insurance pool. He will insist it’s a catastrophe and a denial of his human rights. Tell him that his inability to obtain an erection is because of his diabetes and/or clogged arteries which he induced due to his unhealthy lifestyle so why should anyone else pay for it? Just watch what he does or says.

      Health care is a vehicle through which they express their elitism, just like the immigration system. “I am better than you and I deserve all the nice things provided to me in a manner that is friction free and as pleasant as possible. You are below me and you do not deserve the nice things and need to pay for all of my nice things. Nice things for you should not exist and should be as difficult and painful as possible for you to obtain. If you obtain a nice thing the system isn’t working.” That is the only genuine belief that doesn’t unravel under examination.

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  4. el Avatar
    el

    \ [xykademiqz] you just want to leave them to die because you deem them unworthy

    \ [article] the Republican Party would upend that safety net and contribute to ill health and death, in order to justify their sanctimonious attitude.

    I find it hard to believe “sanctimonious attitude” is the only important reason, especially when I remember Clarissa mentioning middle class people voting for Trump in the hope to lower their taxes.

    Trump is so rich that I don’t think he cares either way about health care; however, he wants to be reelected and many of his voters apperantly think destroying safety nets will make them richer.

    The likes of Mick Mulvaney merely express what some of their voters prefer to hide from others or even themselves in order to consider themselves kind, decent people.

    Clarissa, will families like yours be hurt as the result of Mick Mulvaney’s approach? Or do middle class families really have a monetary reason to support this program?

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    1. Shakti Avatar
      Shakti

      Trump is so rich that I don’t think he cares either way about health care;
      Wrong! He loves the idea of using your healthcare to twist your arm or hold one over on you! Every penny they’ll begrudge you, because that’s the way he is. It has very little do with money. He wanted all of his volunteers to sign NDAS and non competes, you know, people offering their labor for free so why the hell would he stop at health care?

      < a href=”http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/08/trump-files-donald-sick-infant-medical-care”>When Donald Took Revenge by Cutting Off Health Coverage for a Sick Infant

      The story begins after the death of Trump’s father, Fred Sr., in 1999. As David Cay Johnston explains in his book The Making of Donald Trump, Fred Sr. had written a will after the death of his oldest son, Fred Jr., known as Freddy, in 1981. The will left the majority of Fred Sr.’s wealth to Donald and his surviving siblings. Freddy’s family was largely cut out.

      When Fred Sr. died, Freddy’s children sued, claiming that the will “had been ‘procured by fraud and undue influence’ by Donald and the other surviving siblings,” according to Johnston.

      Johnston writes that medical insurance had consistently been provided to the family through Fred Sr.’s company. This coverage was crucial for Freddy’s grandson (Donald’s grandnephew), who suffered from seizures and later developed cerebral palsy. So crucial, in fact, that a letter sent from a Trump lawyer to the insurer after the patriarch’s death in 1999 said that “all costs” for the sick child’s care should be covered, regardless of caps on the plan or medical necessity, according to Johnston. That didn’t last long.

      A week after the lawsuit was filed in court, Freddy’s son (Donald’s nephew) received a letter informing him that the health insurance would be discontinued, meaning his ill son would be left without coverage. Donald openly admitted to the New York Daily News that he and his siblings took this action out of revenge.

      “Why should we give him medical coverage?” Trump said, adding, “They sued my father, essentially. I’m not thrilled when someone sues my father.”

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  5. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    Also from Mulvaney: “Math is hard.”

    Trump Budget Based on $2 Trillion Math Error [Updated]

    http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/trump-budget-based-on-usd2-trillion-math-error.html

    Update: Asked about this absurd mistake, Mulvaney’s explanation does not inspire a great deal of confidence: “This is a preliminary document that will be refined”

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    1. Shakti Avatar
      Shakti

      How is it that
      someone who majored in finance, commerce and international economics made that kind of math error? How is it that none of the quants working in the office caught it?

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  6. Stringer Bell Avatar
    Stringer Bell

    Seriously, Dem campaign ads in 2018/2020 are writing themselves. But if there’s one group I know what can fuck this up, it’s them.

    https://twitter.com/GKButterfield/status/867116138215481344

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      I so hope they don’t fuck it up. But gosh, we all know they can easily do it.

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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