Health Care Is Not A Right
“Some people think that health care is a right. It is not. It is a privilege,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. “If you can pay you can get well. You can live. If you can’t pay, if you’re disabled, it’s the ice floe for you.
“Oh, road apples, there are no ice floes anymore. Global warming. I didn’t say that.”
“It’s mean,” said President Trump, “but I think it’s the best thing for the American people, especially the good, simple(minded) people who voted for me. Did I ever tell you how I studied P.T. Barnum?”
According to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) the Republican Senate bill will effectively eliminate health care for 22 million Americans, many of them rural, children, and old people. Medicaid will be an empty program. “We are humanitarians,” said McConnell. “The House of Representatives bill removed 26 million people. Our slogan is Republicans: We Saved Health Care for 4,000,000.”
The ever-smirkful Ted Cruz, who has had an untreated rash on his brain for many years, is disdainful of the Senate bill. “We vowed to repeal ObamaCare and all we do is diddle ourselves with bills that don’t work. We have to go further to satisfy people and eliminate 40 million people’s health care. Kids (except mine because my job covers me), the unemployed not yet eligible for Medicare, people with pre-existing conditions, tough shit. Let’s be strong and do what we have to do. It’s how the West was won.“
“I mean, look,” said McConnell, “my state, Kentucky, had taken Medicaid expansion because we have so many people who need it and yet in the last election voted in a governor who campaigned for eliminating it. Stupid is everywhere. I mean, look, in some parts of my state, Kentucky, more than 60 percent of the people are covered by Medicaid. The idiots voted to get rid of it. What did they think? They’d still have insurance?
“I mean, Kentucky is one of the nation’s leaders when it comes to opioid addiction. We must be doing something right. We start them young and most never get old. And they have no teeth so we save on dental. Too bad, addicts. That treatment you were getting: history. We also have so many people cooking meth that sometimes I think they went to culinary school.
“We’re going to get rid of preventive health care, maternity benefits, coverage for pre-existing conditions if we can, addiction and mental health services, a lot of stuff for old people, except me because I have benefits that will never expire, and to top it off, we’ll give tax breaks to people who don’t need them. Is America a great country?”
In Kentucky where a Democratic governor took the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion, uninsured patients in many clinics dropped from 19 percent to four. The other Kentucky Senator, Rand Paul, a health care professional, an ophthalmologist is a believer in market forces but blind to the plight of the middle and lower classes. He was against the Senate bill because it didn’t go far enough. “Too many people will still be receiving benefits, too many Kentuckians will still be receiving benefits, and they’ll still vote for me, the knuckleheads,” said Paul. “I am my father’s son except he’s more sincere in his libertarianism and cares more about people.”
Susan Collins, one of the rare Republican senators with a vagina, said, “Those white boys spent two weeks laughing it up talking about how screwed 51 percent of the country was going to be after they finished writing that dumbass bill.
“Women would be in even deeper distress without Planned Parenthood, basic health care for women here and in lots of other states. Pap smears, breast exams, testing for HIV and other sexually transmitted disease, sex education to prevent pregnancies and diseases, and yes, abortions but far less than The 13 and others say.
“They were going to send women back to the dark ages but made sure that Viagra was covered because none of them can get it up. You know what they say, ‘If men were women abortion would be a sacrament.’”
“Sometimes I feel like that Tammy Wynette song, Sometimes It’s Hard To Be A Republican, “ said Senator Lisa Murkowski, of Alaska. “Those 13 fools, McConnell, Cruz, Hatch, Cotton(mouth), and the rest who wrote this bill and Planned Parenthood out of existence they hoped, probably did not come from their mothers wombs but from some really bad place and even though I don’t believe in that crap anyway I still think they came from the darkness.
“13 white men writing a health care bill for the entire country? Holy bear shit as we say up here. That bill rewarded the wealthy and punished everyone else. We need to start teaching civics in high schools again; and ethics and morals in law schools.
“Alaska is a cold and expensive place to be. Almost no one could afford health insurance if it wasn’t for the Affordable Care Act.”
The bill proposed by The 13 contained tax cuts, more than 40 percent going to people with incomes over $1 million to whom it would mean nothing. Oh, there’s that word — mean. “I hate to say it,” said McConnell, “but we are mean, mean, mean sons of bitches. We do racism well and we are deft at targeting immigrants for everything there is, but down, deep down, we’re just plain mean. I join with Secretary of Health Tom Price in remembering the halcyon days before ObamaCare when we had almost 50 million uninsured in the U.S. Our bill will restore the country to that hallowed number of just eight years ago. Remember, Tom Price is a doctor so he knows best. He’s the Dr. Welby of the 21st century.”
“Republicans,” said Tom Cotton(mouth), “have one abiding principal and that is cutting taxes for the wealthiest of us. I understand that once, long ago, we also had beliefs other than that, but those days are gone. Richard Nixon was going to enact a national health care program but the Democrats, instead of going with it, wanted it to be perfect, and then poof, it was gone. Some of us believe that Trump would be happy with a single payer system if it had his name on it, but those of us who know what’s what will never let that happen.
“That middle class we say we love so much. They’re getting it to but won’t even know it until it’s too late. Like Joni Mitchell sang, we’ll ‘pave Paradise and put up a parking lot.’”
Finally, back to the Donald. Donald Trump, who cares about little but Donald Trump, nor will he be outdone by the House and senate, is also attempting to kill people in other countries. His proposed State Department budget cuts $16 billion, $1.1 billion of which provides medicines to people infected with H.I.V. “I think,” said Trump, “that we can kill of more than one million people, a great saving of monies that can be used to aggrandize me. We’ll call it TrumpAid©.”
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
“Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.” Dawn Powell
This has been satire.
