Posted by Tom Knapp at Kn@ppster:
[Note: This is part of an informal “what X should do” series about ObamaCare; I’ve previously posted on “what President Obama should do” and “what the insurance companies should do”]
To quote Nancy Reagan, “just say no”.
Specifically, just say no to this:
[U]nder my plan, individuals will be required to carry basic health insurance — just as most states require you to carry auto insurance. Likewise — likewise, businesses will be required to either offer their workers health care, or chip in to help cover the cost of their workers. There will be a hardship waiver for those individuals who still can’t afford coverage, and 95 percent of all small businesses, because of their size and narrow profit margin, would be exempt from these requirements. But we can’t have large businesses and individuals who can afford coverage game the system by avoiding responsibility to themselves or their employees. Improving our health care system only works if everybody does their part.
To forestall immediate descent into partisan Obama bashing, a brief digression: Obama cribbed the “individual mandate” described above from “conservative” Republican Mitt Romney, who signed it into law as governor of Massachusetts and then bragged about / defended it (rather than vetoing it as he did eight other provisions of the law, including an “employer mandate” similar to the one described above) in 2006. So please … don’t try to turn this into a “left/right” thing.
The insurance companies are drooling over this, of course, and their water carriers in Congress from both major parties will support it (while quietly gutting the “unicorns and ice cream for everyone” restrictions on pre-existing condition refusal, payment caps, etc.) if they can get away with supporting it.
So, the first thing to do is let your congresscritter know that (s)he can’t get away with supporting it.
The second thing? Obey little, resist much.
It just so happens that I am, at this particular moment, insured. And while I’m glad, at this particular moment, to be insured (I have dental coverage, and that coverage is saving me about $1200 on the mass extraction/denture procedure I’m getting ready for — for those who have been following the saga, I got the molds made last week and should get the teeth yanked some time in the two to four weeks), I’ve lived a good part of my life without insurance.
If the proposal described in President Obama’s speech is passed and signed into law, I’ll be returning to uninsured status ASAP — and giving anyone who comes calling to collect a fine a close-up look at my middle finger when I hold out my hands for them to put the cuffs on.
Anyone who’s in a position to do likewise, should.
Labels: ObamaCare
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The “liberal” and “conservative” cryptofascists have the power and resources, and power is its own ideology so the excuses are being worked on continuously regardless of who is in which office.
scatterbrain,
If you want to make a point about my “lack of integrity,” you might want to start by making a point about my lack of integrity.
So far, what I’ve seen from you is a) that you don’t think we live in a police state, and b) that you think I do think that we live in a police state. I don’t see that a difference of opinion on the matter constitutes lack of integrity on anyone’s part.
FWIW, yes, I do believe that we live in a police state of sorts . I began believing that at a time when “liberals” weren’t in charge in Washington.
Everyone seems to be ignoring my original point about Knapp’s lack of integrity and going off on police state tangents.
Anyway, to be honest, I’m more corcerned about the fact that some people believe the idea that those weak, corporatized “liberals” in Washington will and are trying to create their own police state, despite a lack of resources, power and even any ideological motive to do such a thing.
Brian , YOU dont live in a police-state but I sure do .I could lose everything including my kids for something that should never be a crime and is peaceful . I worry about that every day , everywhere I go and in everything I do . thats reality for millions of Americans.
True, but to be fair I haven’t disappeared yet for writing these words. Yet. How much longer?
The “legal” mechanisms are in place. The precedent set. Camps allegedly being constructed and contingency plans being mapped out. The census next year is supposed to GPS every household. ETC.
@17 How so? Leftists don’t complain about the slide to a police state?
Brian , YOU dont live in a police-state but I sure do .I could lose everything including my kids for something that should never be a crime and is peaceful . I worry about that every day , everywhere I go and in everything I do . thats reality for millions of Americans.
to me the worst aspect of the police state isnt even anything concrete , its the constant fear and intimidation.I am soooooooo tired of being piss-pants scared over a traffic stop cause ive got a joint in my purse. its enuf to make ya stay at home most of the time
and the added alienation from the most of the rest of society when youve been arrested and jailed , its monumenatal .
what about the threats of having your kids stolen because you smoke herb , what about fostering a snitch culture , yada and so on
all those things are huge by-products of the police-state . But mostly the fear , its immobilizing sometimes .
But Brian would never understand that , cause he’s in an ivory tower and law-abiding to a fault , im sure.
I like starting off trends; I’ll do it more often…
Knapp, I still question your integrity; if you want to “rebel” against government that’s fine, in fact, my anti-authoritarian learnings encourage that spirit(you little scamp!), but I can’t help but attack your use of language, and the motivations and ideology behind that language, as bitter and generically right-wing as that as say Americas’s prime on-air arseholes such as Glenn Beck, or Michael Savage.
Brian, you don’t have to tell me how bad the drug war is. I was caught up in it as a teen and almost died many times, and I’ve been fighting against it for over 20 years. Before I was an LP member, it was the single issue that I worked on the most by far.
But is it the only police state problem we have? No. Police states consist of a lot more than incarceration.
For instance, I can no longer get on a commercial flight or Amtrak, or leave the country by any means and come back. This is because of new rules in the “war on terror” that A) made getting a new ID more difficult and B) made it a requirement for any of those things. So now that my ID is expired and can’t be renewed, I am stuck in US and riding the greyhound bus.
And of course I’ve been stopped, questioned, detained, harassed, frisked, etc., more times than I can count. The vast majority of those times involved no incarceration, but they add to a police state atmosphere of intimidation. This has all gotten much worse since 9/11, although the wars on drugs and migrants are behind a lot of this as well.
Some other things that don’t involve incarceration that are elements of a police state:
Being videotaped all over the place while out and about.
Having your email and phone calls monitored.
On those two counts, the “war on terror” is just as much or more to blame than the “war on drugs.”
Being held indefinitely, without outside communication, legal representation or charges. That one is thanks to the terror war.
Being tortured while in custody. That happens in the drug war, but at least the regime does not try to justify and legalize it – that’s all thanks to the terror war.
Having your dog shot by cops. That one usually has the proximate cause of the drug war, but much of the extra paramilitary weapons and training, recent combat experience, bad attitude and piles of extra funds going to police departments are due to the terror war.
Having your stuff destroyed or confiscated by cops. See last item.
Having your life destroyed after you get out of jail. Sure, a felony record, trauma from prison rape, etc., destroy the lives of many people caught up in the drug war. But what happens to people caught up in the sex war can be even worse. Quoting from the same article again:
– http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2009/09/there-is-fury-and-and-sadness-inside.html
So to sum up, there are many more aspects to police states that we are experiencing than just incarceration, and many more excuses than only the “war on drugs.”
In terms of person-years of unjust incarceration, I’d wager that the war on drugs is at least two orders of magnitude — i.e. 100 times — worse than all the other problems you’ve mentioned combined. There are hundreds of thousands of people doing time for victimless drug crimes. How many people do you think are doing time for consensual teenage sex? Care to give us an integer answer?
And again, my thesis is about trends. To refute it, you can’t just say “X sucks in 2009”. You have to offer evidence that X was better in previous decades, and reasons to believe that X will be even worse in coming decades.
Brian, there are afar more people in prison, jail, on parole and probation than there were several decades ago. There are way more police cameras, police stops, SWAT raids, stop-and-frisks, checkpoints, run a makes, etc so on.
Gestapo is all I could think of every time I went through US customs. And now that I can’t afford the regime permission slip to leave this country anymore, I am thinking of it more and more.
And before anyone says anything, yes, I have been all over the world and seen real police states in action.
You might think differently about whether you live in a “police state” if you were a black kept from voting,
As more and more are due to the criminal injustice system, which includes but is not limited to the drug war.
or a teenager needing an illegal abortion,
How about a teenager facing a life of sex offender status as a result of concensual sex between teens? See link in comment 9.
or a demonstrator jailed for burning a flag, or a poker dealer busted for running an underground game.
Arrests at demonstrations are commonplace these days. In fact if you are walking through the area unaware that there is a demonstration going on you may get stomped by a horse or whacked by a police baton. It has happened to people I know and almost happened to me.
And yes, there are still raids of underground poker games going and a new crackdown on internet gambling (not very effective, but nevertheless real).
Conviction rates obviously involve selection effects, and a snapshot of current rates is not evidence for or against a trend. I’m curious what conviction rate you would take to be optimal.
You might think differently about whether you live in a “police state” if you were a black kept from voting, or a wife whose rape by her husband was legal, or a gay convicted of sodomy, or a teenager needing an illegal abortion, or a demonstrator jailed for burning a flag, or a poker dealer busted for running an underground game. So yes, I take “police state” to broadly implicate any police-enforced restrictions on our personal/civil liberties. A narrow definition of “police state” would only involve restrictions on dissent and exit, and America is very free on that score.
The positive trend in criminal procedure to which I refer involves Miranda rights, exclusionary rules, probable cause, capital punishment, cruel and unusual punishment, jury selection, assistance of counsel, juvenile justice, justice for the mentally impaired, discovery rules, etc. For details, see the long list of court decisions e.g. here, most of which advanced civil liberties.
We’re a long way from my libertopia, but to proclaim in public using your real name that we live in a “police state” is simply self-refuting.
“The long-term trends on racism, civil rights, divorce rights, sexual freedom, reproductive freedom, gay rights, criminal procedure, free expression, gambling are all positive.”
None of which, except for criminal procedure, has any bearing on whether or not a state is a police state.
I’m not sure what it is you consider “positive” about the trend in criminal procedure.
The last time I looked at the statistics, 98.x% of charges resulted in “convictions,” and only 6.x% of those were the result of trial by jury. The other 92% were plea bargains — and I have seen at first hand the tactics prosecutors use to make those happen.
Anyone believes that 98.x% of those charged with crimes are guilty of those crimes should say so. After they take the crack pipe out of their mouth, that is.
Must be my imagination. All those police cameras, robocops, ID checkpoints, corrections corporations. Yep, I’m just having a nightmare. Somebody wake me up.
Repeating “gestapo” over and over doesn’t make it so. “War on terror” and migration complaints are nothing compared to the drug war. The long-term trends on racism, civil rights, divorce rights, sexual freedom, reproductive freedom, gay rights, criminal procedure, free expression, gambling are all positive.
Or take this….please
http://freestudents.blogspot.com/2009/09/there-is-fury-and-and-sadness-inside.html
The drug war is the outlier.
Au contraire. The migration gestapo, the homeland security apparatus/”terror war”, etc., are no outlier. 100,000 SWAT raids a year, 2 million in jails and prisons and several million more on parole and probation, the TSA, and it just goes on and gets worse no matter who is in office.
The drug war is the outlier. When you look at the broader trends, you should fear neophobia more than a “police state”.
and incidentally more people were arrested for weed during the Clinton Administration than the Bush one.
the police state isnt around the corner
Its here , no propaganda , no paranoia just facts.
No other Nation on earth has ever imprisoned a higher % of its own people . we ARE the worlds leading jailer , this is predominantly because of unjust drug laws . and on and on , you know the spiel .
paranoid, partisan, acting like the police state is just around the corner; left-libertarian my arse!
I’m not only a left-libertarian, but a former radical leftist in the standard modern US sense. I seem to recall many of us being concerned with a police state being just around the corner during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, and I saw much of the same among leftists during the W years – and fully agreed with them. Little on that score has changed in my evolution from leftist to libertarian to left-libertarian, except that I now see an equal police state danger from regimes such as those of Clinton and Obama.
scatterbrain,
The “individual mandate” described by Obama, according to a Washington Post article I read this morning, calls for a fine of $750-$950 to be imposed on anyone who declines to purchase insurance coverage.
I won’t buy the coverage, and I won’t pay the fine.
Are you suggesting that people who a) break the law and b) refuse to pay a fine are not carted off to jail in the US?
As far as “partisanship” is concerned, well, yes, I am a partisan Libertarian. As I point out in the post, the “individual mandate” was actually a Republican idea; Obama’s just riffing on it in a different key.
“If the proposal described in President Obama’s speech is passed and signed into law, I’ll be returning to uninsured status ASAP — and giving anyone who comes calling to collect a fine a close-up look at my middle finger when I hold out my hands for them to put the cuffs on.”
Knapp, you really are no better than the common teabagger; paranoid, partisan, acting like the police state is just around the corner; left-libertarian my arse!
I’m fine with that, but the “free rider” problem must be answered. How about it be handled like the Amish do with social security – you someday need it but have agreed not to take it?
In other words, no insurance then no obligation for hospitals and other health care providers to give you anything. Put up a letter of credit before treatment or depend on charity. Those who sob (and there are a lot of them in America) about people dying in the emergency room parking lot can start giving their charity contributions to hospitals instead of non-life prolonging stuff like the ballet, kids soccer league, art galleries, “toothbrushes for our troops,” etc.