Sunday, July 19, 2015

Denninger-Why I Find It Hard To Give A F**k

 h/t WRSA

It's very hard for me to give a **** these days.
In fact, it's becoming nearly impossible.  The reasons are many, with the most-serious being your refusal to give a ****.
You don't give a **** that the entire medical industry rips everyone off to the tune of 200, 300, 400, 500% or more of what virtually everything should cost.  This is why you "need" health insurance.  It is why we "need" Medicare.  The practices of this "industry" in virtually every other line of business would result in the people involved going to prison for decades, yet you tolerate this daily despite the fact that it is the largest cause of bankruptcy in the United States.  You cannot take your car in for an oil change or have the furnace guy come and fix your heating system in your home without being quoted a price before work begins, and were two gas stations to collude on prices the owners of both would be charged with felonies.
You don't give a **** that pharmaceutical companies literally price drugs at a half-million dollars a year -- and if you need it, you'll need it effectively forever.  There are so few people who have that sort of money that this kind of pricing is by definition theft, as the only way to "afford' such a drug is to steal the money from someone else (through legal means or otherwise.)  What's worse is that you let them get away with having most of the development cost of these "wonder drugs" be born through publicly-funded research; it's not even their money at risk (for the most part) when such a new drug is tested, it's yours and mine.  We then wonder why so-called "health insurance" is as expensive as it is and why the stock of firms in that business such as Aetna (NYSE: AET) are up more than 500% since 2009, roughly doubling in the two years since the Obamacare "mandates, er, taxes" kicked in and stock in company that makes the drug in this example (ALXN) is up 1,000% since 2009.  You, on the other hand, will be flirting with bankruptcy (if not rendered penniless, insurance or no) if you get sick.
You don't give a **** that the US Supreme Court in two separate decisions on the same underlying issue re-wrote Obamacare in ways that severely implicate your fundamental and Constitutional Rights.  When Obamacare was found "Constitutional" originally it occurred through re-writing the law to find that the "penalty" was actually a tax, but in doing so it was re-written as a direct tax that is not apportioned nor is it a tax on income, which means it is explicitly unconstitutional. You didn't care enough about that to demand that this crap stop, and thus opened the door to the second and more-recent decision which simply cemented the first: Words (and the Constitution) don't matter if they fail to meet a desired political outcome! (Roberts actually said in that opinion that to uphold the law as written "would destabilize the individual insurance market"; in other words the federal spending must flow irrespective of what Congress actually did and Congress cannot be left to fix it, IF it was a mistake.)  The result of this second decision was that people cheered the screwing that the aforementioned medical industry has been dishing out for the last four decades instead of immediately taking to the streets and demanding the arrest and prosecution of everyone involved in that part of the so-called "economy" and both blatantly unconstitutional acts of the court.

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