After watching Paul
Ryan’s press conference where
he tried to Power Point an explanation of how his reform would work and why it was necessary, my initial
reaction was “What a moron. Does anyone
actually believes any of this?”
But then after having a bit of a think I realized that he
knows precisely how insurance works.
Know what else he knows? That a lot of other people do not.
There is a high number of people who think that insurance
works like a high interest savings account/discount card. Something you pay
into, but the money is only yours and that is what you get back.
Ryan is playing to the crowd here. Lots of people don’t think that the healthy should pay
for the sick if you put it in bald terms like that. “My insurance premiums are for my insurance. I don’t want it going to cover other
people! I should be able to forgo this and pay less.”
And they are counting on that crowd to help them sell his reform.
Ryan’s press conference where
he tried to Power Point an explanation of how his reform would work and why it was necessary, my initial
reaction was “What a moron. Does anyone
actually believes any of this?”
But then after having a bit of a think I realized that he
knows precisely how insurance works.
Know what else he knows? That a lot of other people do not.
There is a high number of people who think that insurance
works like a high interest savings account/discount card. Something you pay
into, but the money is only yours and that is what you get back.
Ryan is playing to the crowd here. Lots of people don’t think that the healthy should pay
for the sick if you put it in bald terms like that. “My insurance premiums are for my insurance. I don’t want it going to cover other
people! I should be able to forgo this and pay less.”
And they are counting on that crowd to help them sell his reform.
“We can never undo what we have done. We can never go back in time. We write history with our decisions and our actions. But we also write history with our responses to those actions. We can leave the pain and the damage in our wake, unattended, or we can do the work of acknowledging and fixing, to whatever extent possible, the harm that we have caused.”
— On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg
— On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg