That Dipstick From Accounting Doesn't Know Squat

[sheshe2]

As Chuck Pierce reminds us, the biggest media falsehood over the last several years that doesn't personally involve Barack Obama is the idiotic notion that GOP House Speaker Paul Ryan is some sort of policy wonk.

I had thought that the burlesque comic opera The Agony of Paul Ryan, Genius had closed on the night in 2012 when Joe Biden laughed the zombie-eyed granny starver off the stage during their debate. (That was the night that Ryan demonstrated that he knew it snowed in Afghanistan in the winter.) But I had not reckoned with his many fanboys among the kept political press. He ascended to become Speaker of the House, largely because nobody else wanted the job after John Boehner got kicked to the curb by the crazy people.

Now he is out there pimping the dungheap that is the new healthcare reform bill as though Mitch and Murray from downtown were lighting his pants on fire. He even lost the suit coat and broke out the PowerPoint on Thursday. It was like watching something on cable access late at night, or a flop-sweaty rookie substitute teacher, and it was hilarious—except for the parts where people will lose their health insurance and die, of course. And this is what he said and, peace be unto Dave Barry, I am not making it up, either:

Paul Ryan said that insurance cannot work if healthy people have to pay more to subsidize the sick.

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Fuck the GOPeeeeeeeee

[guillaumeb]

1. Prior to that VP debate, the media was explining how Ryan would school old Joe Biden.

The debate was nothing of the sort, because Ryan was revealed as a phony who could not defend his ideas or even articulate them.

[sheshe2]

4. That was the debate for the ages.

Priceless...



Pretty sure Ryan had a little trickle down from the look Biden gave him.

[msanthrope]

6. "Fraidy pee" is what that look is called. nt

[sheshe2]

7. "Fraidy pee"

[guillaumeb]

8. The trickle down into the trousers syndrome?

Ryan knew that he had lost. As did the audience.

[sheshe2]

10. And later that night...

Ryan ....

[guillaumeb]

11. A young Paul Ryan?

Great photo.

[sheshe2]

12. Well Joe took him down a few pegs...

[herding cats]

2. Pierce nailed him hard in that statement.

This is literally how all insurance works. If someone's house burns down, some of your fire insurance money goes to help that person rebuild. If someone gets sick, some of your premium, healthy person, goes toward that person's coverage. Increasingly, I have come to believe that Paul Ryan is a not particularly bright creature from another world. Let us see if we can explain this to the lad.
Let's say that, in 1986, a 16-year-old lad loses his father to a sudden heart attack. Despite the fact that the family's construction firm is relatively prosperous due to its generous share of government contracts, the family's finances are considerably straitened. For the next two years, the young man and his mother receive Social Security survivor's benefits. Of course, these came from millions of people who had Social Security withheld from their paychecks and whose fathers did not die young due to a sudden heart attack. One of them was, say, a 32-year-old sportswriter for the Boston Herald, who had Social Security withheld from what he was paid to watch the Red Sox blow the '86 World Series, and whose father was still alive, but slipping fast into Alzheimer's. Some of his money went to make sure Paul Ryan could complete high school and go on the college and get the BA in economics that made him the smartest man in the world.

It was positively brutal!

[sheshe2]

5. Brutal and so well deserved.

They all need to be taken down this way.

[pinboy3niner]

3. A GOP Rep said on TV today he has an idea where the plan scoring will come out because "I'm a CPA"

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

9. Do the GOPers have no idea how insurance actually works?

Insurance is, in some respects, the purest form of socialism, so maybe that's why they hate it (although insurance company executives make out like bandits, and the GOP seems to have no problem with that). Insurance is simply a form of risk management in which people contribute to a fund or pool established to compensate the participants in the event of some kind of financial loss. The pool has to be large enough to cover all anticipated losses; while many members of the pool will never have a loss, a smaller number might have large losses. Obviously the insurance pool has to collect enough money from each member to be sure those probable losses are covered. So the insurer has to estimate the probability and size of insured claims. That's what underwriters do. But the basic idea is that most participants in the pool will be paying the losses suffered by some other participants.

If I pay $1000 a year for homeowners' insurance but never make a claim because I've never had a fire, an ice dam, storm damage, etc., I can gripe that I'm paying for somebody else's losses - but if I've never had a loss I'm still down only my premium payments. If somebody else's house burns down they'll get back the insured value of the house, but they've also been paying their $1,000 a year. Same with health insurance. The reason you pay premiums is for risk management - bankruptcy insurance, in effect. If you don't get sick your premiums are used to pay the medical bills of someone who does. If you get sick, the premiums of other policy holders pay your medical bills. Socialism!

What the GOPers can't seem to figure out is that the only way to cover everybody with no exclusions and no lifetime limits is to have a large pool paid into by people who are less likely to make claims - though even young, healthy people can have disabling car accidents and catch expensive diseases. The GOPers hate the individual mandate (the one thing in the ACA that makes that sort of coverage possible) because, they claim, it restricts people's "freedom."
But how "free" are you if you can't afford health insurance, meaning you can't afford medical care? Being dead is about the least free condition I can think of, but I guess they think a dying cancer patient who can't afford chemo is "free."

Is it that they don't understand insurance, or is it that they understand it but just don't like the idea that everyone should have it because they aren't free enough if they have to buy it?

Obviously the real answer is a single-payer system like the rest of the world has - the elimination of the greedy for-profit insurers as middlemen - but that's not going to happen as long as the GOPers are in power.

[mcar]

13. Ryan is evil

I mean that sincerely.