From the DrakeGTA Archives: An article about Obamacare!
Good news everyone!
After talking about doing it for the last two years, work has officially begun on DrakeGTA.com.
As I write this, it’s the beginning of March, and, while we’re currently working on Rantlister, we’ve also started the process of beginning work on the DrakeGTA Archives. The web space is set up, WordPress is uploaded, and once we’ve finished Rantlister we’ll be moving on to DrakeGTA. This article is probably going to publish in April, so by then Rantlister should be up and running and work should already be well underway on DrakeGTA. (EDIT FROM FUTURE AJ: It is. Man, this guy loved to write. BTW, disregard most of that last paragraph. Articles are being republished to DrakeGTA.com daily now.)
The point of the new DrakeGTA Archives website will be to repost as much of Drake’s old articles as we can salvage from the Internet Archive. We’re also going to poke around the web and see if we can find more of Drake’s writing on other sites. I also intend to reach out to his wife and see if there’s anything she’d like to contribute.
Essentially, the new site will be a memorial for my friend.
I’m not sure how long the project will take to complete, but you’ll be able to monitor the progress live. Once the WordPress theme is built (FUTURE AJ SAYS: Already built), most of the work is going to be scrounging through the Internet Archive and copying over old articles. A lot of Drake’s old stuff was image-heavy or linked to YouTube videos that are long since dead, so the bulk of the work will involve finding those images and videos again. I like to think that me and Drake operated on similar wave lengths, but there’s been a few times where I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was talking about or referencing.
As far as the DrakeGTA Archives articles on AJnet Magazine go, this will probably be the last one until we’ve completed DrakeGTA.com. The feature isn’t going away, it’s just taking a break. Once all his old articles are up on there, we’ll have a huge pool of content to talk about here. He has way more content than I thought he did, I’m talking articles in the hundreds, maybe even thousands.
Anyway, today’s article is about Obamacare.
Drake was a medical professional, specifically, a nurse. Judging from the stuff he’d post on the AJnet Forums, it’s safe to say that he didn’t like his job very much. I don’t think he wrote many (if any) articles specifically about his job, but he definitely didn’t shy away from invoking his expertise when it was relevant.
When Obama introduced his plan for healthcare reform, dubbed “Obamacare”, a lot of people were up in arms about it. Specifically, the part that mandated that all Americans must have health insurance, or be penalized at tax time.
A lot of us ranters leaned to the right politically at the time, so of course we all fired up our keyboards to write about this. I remember writing a rather bombastic knee-jerk piece where I claimed that the police would be sent to my door over not having health insurance, and that they would be met with lethal force. Needless to say, this article didn’t make the cut when I transitioned to WordPress in 2016, and I don’t know where the article is in my files. It’s probably for the better.
Drake’s article on Obamacare was a little more levelheaded than mine. Because he was a nurse, Drake could give a more accurate criticism of the bill and provide actual reasons why it wouldn’t work. A far cry from threatening to have a gun battle with the police over the issue.
Looking at his article now, I’d say he made some great points, namely that the people involved with writing the bill were all lobbyists and not actual healthcare providers. We need healthcare reform in America for sure, but this wasn’t it. The bill was just a cash grab by the insurance industry, plain and simple.
Trump would later repeal parts of Obamacare, including the part that requires all Americans to have insurance. One of the few good things he’s done, in my opinion.
Without further ado, this is “This is why we can’t have nice things”, Drake’s criticism of Obamacare, originally published to DrakeGTA.com on December 15, 2009.
I work at a hospital, so I get to hear people’s opinions on healthcare reform everyday. I watch the news, I read the articles, I’ve even skimmed some of the proposed legislation. I’m not going to pretend to be an expert, but I would say I’m about as qualified to have an opinion as anyone else; by which I mean, not qualified at all. That’s why I don’t write about this kind of thing, because everyone has diarrhea of the mouth, talking crap that they don’t understand at rapid speed and the last thing I want to do is add noise and confusion to the noise and confusion.
Let’s face it, the guy who wrote the book on the current democratic party strategy was a felon, and he wrote the book while in prison for bank-fraud. I don’t give a shit. As far as I’m concerned, he’s no more or less of a crook than anyone else in Washington, he just got caught. The interesting thing, all these people who have added and subtracted their parts to this bill, none of them are healthcare providers. We don’t have doctors writing this thing, in fact, we have lobbyists writing this thing, lobbyists for big insurances companies and pharmaceutical companies. Do we not see the conflict of interest here? Who is least qualified write this bill? Who has a vested interest in seeing that this bill ends up being nothing but a huge money funnel?
People are fucking stupid, the whole reason we needed this bill is because insurance companies suck, but right now, it looks likes this bill is going to make health insurance a mandatory legal requirement, with no public alternative for the insurance companies to compete with. What the hell is that? That’s like saying; “We’ve noticed that some people are injured by our sandpaper toilet tissue, so we’ve decided that all toilet paper should be made of sandpaper.”
This bill is going to be beyond worthless. What’s wrong with medical care in America? Three things,
- Big pharmaceutical companies screwing the sick with 1000% profit margins,
- Insurance companies fucking the consumer by dropping / denying coverage for anyone who actually gets sick,
- Lawyers suing the shit out of anything that moves, driving up the cost of medical care and the cost of liability insurance.
This bill caters to all three of these groups, and does nothing for the doctors, nurses, and healthcare providers trying to save your ass.
Tort reform? Oh hell no, that would make too much sense. No one has the balls, no one wants to piss off the lawyers, they might get sued.
That’s the way it always works, that’s the way every piece of legislation always turns out, it might start out as a good idea, but every special interest group with money to throw at corrupt leaders gets their fingers in the pie. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Think about it, in America, we get screwed on almost everything. We pay too much for cellphone service (and yet, our speeds and coverage are spotty at best), we pay too much for Internet (and yet, we are pretty slow compared to other nations), we pay too much for TV (because there is no option for TV over Internet, and the cable/phone companies that provide our Internet like it that way), we pay too much for healthcare (more than twice as much as any other nation), we pay too much for education (but yet, we aren’t among the top 10 nations in education.)
This is why we can’t have nice things, because we turn everything into a fight between liberals and conservatives, but never address the real issue, that none of these people are qualified to write fortune cookies, much-less important legislation that impacts people’s lives, and they end up bowing to the wishes of special interest groups. This is why we can’t have nice things.
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