Occam's Razor

Back in January I mentioned a mindful eating course I was enrolled in. A full discussion of the course is probably for another time if I think it warrants a blog post. (I’ve become pickier about what I blog about, as I post less frequently and am trying hard to make my posts more relevant and topical.) One of the interesting takeaways from the course though was to learn to trust your body.

It turns out this is a really hard thing to do, particularly here in America. For most of us spend lives trying to respond to conformance requests coming mostly from outside ourselves. It’s constant and incessant. In the area of eating, you get endless “shoulds” and guilt-laden advice about what to eat, when, how much and using which techniques. These techniques rarely work in the long term because they are not natural to us, which is why so many of us are overweight and obese. Trusting to your own inner wisdom shouldn’t be hard, but it is hard because we simply don’t know how.

Of course it’s much more than food. We spend much of our lives being inauthentic to ourselves. We pray to gods we don’t really believe in. We chase after status symbols thinking we’ll be better or happier when we possess that McMansion or that BMW. We take advice from popular people in our class or some loudmouth on the TV or talk radio thinking they are actually wiser than we are. More topically, we vote for people who don’t have our best interest at heart, ending up more unhappy and miserable as a result.

We do this at least in part because we’ve learned that to get along you got to go along. We want to belong and since most of us don’t have local tribes anymore, we join our virtual tribes instead. They are often led by people looking to screw us over, if not monetarily then at least mentally. Facing the reality of our bad choices is hard. If we were to face them, we would often realize we were played for a fool. So rather than face them we continue to work against our own self-interest.

Logically most of those who voted Republican or for Trump should be regretting their choices. Many of them are but of course even Trump has a dependable group who will stick with him no matter how much he sticks it to them. As I noted recently, ninety percent of Republicans voted for Trump, despite knowing full well what he was about: a bankrupt-prone, pussy-grabbing businessman with zero common sense and a racist streak a mile wide.

It seems though that many who voted for Republicans are waking up. We see this not in a pressing desire to vote for a Democrat, but in polls showing waning enthusiasm for their fellow Republicans. There are other polls that show even majorities of Republicans disapproving of their party’s actions. Both the House and Senate health care “reform” bills are widely despised, even among Republicans.

Trump ran partly on a platform of reforming health care. It would be easy to reform he told us, and you would get better coverage for less. Whereas the sad reality is that Trump really has no idea what’s in the bills he has been promoting, other than he heard the House bill was “mean” so he instructed the Senate not to make their bill “mean”.

Trump is not being mendacious; he is simply unable to absorb detail. But if the Congressional Budget Office is to be believed, either 22 or 23 million people will be uninsured within ten years if either of these bills become law, with 14 million losing health insurance within the first year and likely a majority of them will be Republicans. Those with insurance will pay a lot more, both in higher premiums and higher deductibles. Technically these don’t amount to higher taxes since this money is not going to the government. If it did, it might buy something useful. It will feel like a tax hike however as your standard of living rapidly erodes.

If either of these bills becomes law, it will be a disaster. It certainly will be for those losing health insurance. The reality however will be much more brutal. Health care spending is a huge part of our economy. It will close hospitals, mostly in rural areas. Without insurance people won’t see doctors, so doctors will bill fewer hours and make less money. The cost of emergency care will be foisted on those still with insurance, raising the cost of insurance even higher. It will have a huge cascading effect of not only people dying prematurely and in misery, but in creating huge amounts of medical debt and lost health care jobs. It will careen like a locomotive off its tracks and wreck much of our economy. It won’t affect just the healthcare industry, but all those businesses that depend on health care employees and health care spending, which is most of the economy.

All this is to give huge tax cuts to the 1% who don’t need the money. Arguably the taxes these rich people pay pay for themselves in sustained economic growth, which is keeping stock prices and their portfolio rising.

Some lessons for me:

• Our current healthcare system must be fundamentally changed if it is to survive at all. The current system works poorly, but it works a whole lot better than it will if either of these bills pass.
• It’s really in everyone’s best interest to reform our health care system, as it is unsustainable. If there is any industry too big to fail, it’s not on Wall Street but our health care system. It feeds off patients. And patients need insurance to see doctors because only the top 1% can pay for their own healthcare.
• Obamacare is dying, but not for the reasons people think. It’s dying because it tried to work using a system of private insurance. It’s the private health care system that no longer works as it puts profits first, not people.
• Expanded Medicaid is demonstrating to new generations that socialized medicine does work. Ask most of Mitch McConnell’s constituents, who are on the program. Only to them it’s something called KyNect.
• Like it or not we are at a health care inflection point. We must solve this fundamental issue in the only way it can be solved: through comprehensive national legislation that addresses its critical defects. Obamacare does not need amending. And it needs to be replaced with something that is the complete opposite of what both bills in Congress purport to call “health care”.
• My life, and yours, depends on us rising to the occasion.