Labels: arrogance, deeply disturbing shit, Greedy Republican Bastards, I Got Mine and Fuck You, Paul Ryan

Medicare is a government-run insurance system that directly pays health-care providers. Vouchercare would cut checks to insurance companies instead. Specifically, the program would pay a fixed amount toward private health insurance — higher for the poor, lower for the rich, but not varying at all with the actual level of premiums. If you couldn’t afford a policy adequate for your needs, even with the voucher, that would be your problem.

And most seniors wouldn’t be able to afford adequate coverage. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that to get coverage equivalent to what they have now, older Americans would have to pay vastly more out of pocket under the Paul Ryan plan than they would if Medicare as we know it was preserved. Based on the budget office estimates, the typical senior would end up paying around $6,000 more out of pocket in the plan’s first year of operation.

By the way, defenders of the G.O.P. plan often assert that it resembles other, less unpopular programs. For a while they claimed, falsely, that Vouchercare would be just like the coverage federal employees get. More recently, I’ve been seeing claims that Vouchercare would be just like the system created for Americans under 65 by last year’s health care reform — a fairly remarkable defense from a party that has denounced that reform as evil incarnate.

So let me make two points. First, Obamacare was very much a second-best plan, conditioned by perceived political realities. Most of the health reformers I know would have greatly preferred simply expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. Second, the Affordable Care Act is all about making health care, well, affordable, offering subsidies whose size is determined by the need to limit the share of their income that families spend on medical costs. Vouchercare, by contrast, would simply hand out vouchers of a fixed size, regardless of the actual cost of insurance. And these vouchers would be grossly inadequate.

Labels: Greedy Republican Bastards, I Got Mine and Fuck You, Medicare, Republican men

One day as a 16 year old, Ryan came upon the lifeless body of his father. Paul Ryan, Sr. had died of a heart attack at age 55, leaving the Janesville Craig High School 10th grader, his three older brothers and sisters and his mother alone. It was Paul who told the family of his father’s death.

With his father’s passing, young Paul collected Social Security benefits until age 18, which he put away for college. To make ends meet, Paul’s mother returned to school to study interior design. His siblings were off at college. Ryan remembers this difficult time bringing him and his mother closer.

Labels: assholes, Greedy Republican Bastards, hypocrisy, I Got Mine and Fuck You

Noted speed freak, serial-killer fangirl, and Tea Party hero Ayn Rand was also a kleptoparasite, sneakily gobbling up taxpayer funds under an assumed name to pay for her medical treatments after she got lung cancer.

An interview with Evva Pryror, a social worker and consultant to Miss Rand's law firm of Ernst, Cane, Gitlin and Winick verified that on Miss Rand's behalf she secured Rand's Social Security and Medicare payments which Ayn received under the name of Ann O'Connor (husband Frank O'Connor).

As Pryor said, "Doctors cost a lot more money than books earn and she could be totally wiped out" without the aid of these two government programs. Ayn took the bail out even though Ayn "despised government interference and felt that people should and could live independently... She didn't feel that an individual should take help."

But alas she did and said it was wrong for everyone else to do so.

Labels: hypocrisy, I Got Mine and Fuck You, wingnuttia

“Making sure these kids have a shot at the American Dream like I did is very important,” he said, choking up, when asked on “60 Minutes” about his crying.

But a look at Boehner’s record during his two decades in Congress shows a man who has voted against nearly every boost for the working stiff. There’s no empathy for those with the longest shots at the American Dream in his voting pattern. Instead, we see a politician who is hard-hearted in his legislative treatment of the people now coping with the kind of economic conditions in which the Boehner family grew up.

The American Dream that Boehner evokes between tears has never been more threatened. By some measures, social mobility — that is, the ability of people to move up a notch in class — is at an all-time low in this country. Poor Americans now have less than a 5 percent chance of rising to the upper-middle-class within their lifetimes.

At the same time, the gap between the rich and poor, and the concentration of wealth owned by those at the very top, has never been so great. After examining these trends, The Economist wrote that “the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society.”

Numerous studies have shown that what knocks people out of the middle class, or keeps them from ever joining it, is a catastrophic bill or two — usually from getting sick and not having health care. Then, those debts go on credit cards, which leads to a misery hole of high interest and limited choices.

[snip]

Against this backdrop, Boehner has fought against strivers and strugglers at the lower end, while shilling for ever-more concentrated corporate power and banker control. The one thing that stirs his passion is tax cuts. But nearly half of American households don’t pay any income tax at all, so Boehner’s crusade doesn’t affect them. And a decade of aggressive tax-cutting has done nothing to reverse the woes of everyday working people.

Boehner voted for the major trade agreements that make it easier to ship jobs overseas, while voting against assistance to workers who lose jobs to globalization. He voted no on expanding health care for poor children, no on raising the federal minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, and no on a bill to allow people to purchase F.D.A.-certified prescription drugs at a cheaper price from certain countries.

So: he wants to deny health care to poor children, let millionaires hold onto more of their money while blocking a small raise for the lowest earners and prevent people on fixed incomes from getting a break on the costliest item in their personal budget — their meds.

Boehner got a zero rating from Citizens for Tax Justice, a nonprofit founded in 1979 to give average people a greater voice on tax policy amidst a stadium full of lobbyists for the rich.

More recently, he voted against modifying bankruptcy rules — rebuffing an effort to help people avoid mortgage foreclosures. He said no to the federal rescue of General Motors, which saved the American auto industry, countless jobs in Boehner’s Midwest, and did it all without a long-lasting hit on the Treasury. And he gave a thumbs down to regulation of the subprime mortgage industry.

Like Boehner’s father, my grandmother in Chicago owned a small bar that catered to a working-class clientele. She lived above the bar, a widowed single mother, working seven days a week. What saved her in her old age was a great, expansive government program that allowed so many Americans to live out the last decades of their lives in dignity — Medicare. Yes, that single-payer, socialized medical system that Boehner would surely vote against if it came up today.

Crying is often the sign of excruciatingly mixed emotion. Take the mother who cries at her daughter's wedding: She may be happy about the marriage and flooded with positive emotions — feelings of role fulfillment, of accomplishment, of pride, of happiness for her daughter. At the same time, she feels a sense of loss: A part of her life is over; she is losing not only a daughter but a purpose, a role.

Even our moments of extreme grief are complicated. The stages of grief do not follow each other in a neat therapeutic procession; instead, they are often a jumble. Loss is complicated by rage, by denial, by guilt. We weep and we wail, and we do so not because we know, without a doubt, exactly what we are feeling. We cry, in fact, because we don't.

Boehner's tears aren't hard to read. After analyzing hundreds of psychological experiments and sociological studies of weeping, hundreds of accounts of crying in different cultures and different historical periods, thousands of tearful moments in film and fiction and art, I have come to see that, like the mother of the bride, many of us weep because we are overwhelmed by contradictions.

[snip]

The America that gave Boehner a shot at his dream had a minimum wage that, adjusted for inflation, topped $10 an hour. In 2006, he voted against letting the minimum rise from $5.15 to its current $7.25. It took Boehner seven years to finish college while working minimum-wage jobs; how long would it have taken if the minimum wage had purchased as little as it does today?

Boehner put himself through school, he said on election night, unsuccessfully trying to stem the flow of tears, "working every rotten job there was." He mopped floors, waited tables and tended bar. One could feel both his horror at once having done that sort of work and his exuberance at having left it behind to become the golfing, jet-setting, deeply tanned man weeping before the cameras.

Would he agree with this assessment? Does he know that, despite his assertions to the contrary, cutting taxes for the rich won't do anything to produce those jobs he keeps promising? Does he feel conflicted knowing that his golf bill (reported at $83,000 last year) is six or seven times the take-home pay of someone working 40 hours a week at minimum wage, and several times the median income in many of our communities?

I suspect he does, and that when he thinks about the America of his youth, he knows it will never return if his party gets its way in Washington. It is all too much. He weeps.

Labels: faux moral outrage, Greedy Republican Bastards, I Got Mine and Fuck You, John Boehner

Labels: Harry Reid, I Got Mine and Fuck You, Teabaggers, We Are So Screwed

Labels: compassion, greed, humanity, I Got Mine and Fuck You, Michael Moore, Wolf Blitzer