Randroid Power Point
by digby
I was going to write about Paul Ryan's exciting Obamacare power point presentation this morning but it was so boring I fell asleep in my coffee. Thank goodness Charlie Pierce was able to pinch himself awake long enough to write this dispatch:
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.
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.
There's more and you should read it.
The Ayn Ran fanboy doesn't believe in insurance. Of course he doesn't. Insurance is one of those things where your money goes into a big pot to pay for people's misfortunes with the understanding that it will pay for yours should one befall you. It's a simple concept that Randroids find ridiculous. Good, moral citizens don't need to pool their risk with other people because good moral people are rich and bad, immoral people are poor.
That's Ryan's belief. It's a little bit different from the Trump Bannon approach which simply says that good moral people are white so there's bound to be a little implementation problem. If they can just find a way to ensure that only the poor people of color are screwed we might have a compromise.
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