The worst mass shooting in U.S. history happened in my hometown this weekend.

Everyone is now playing their assigned roles. The gun nuts are doing their usual thing: ignoring, averting, “praying”, reminding us all that they have a God-given right to legally purchase, own, and presumably use machines that have absolutely no intended purpose beyond the murder of human beings. The partisans are trying to score points in this election season for pretending that this was a 9/11-style terrorist attack. Amidst the calls for calm reflection and intelligent action, there’s a thunder of “I told you so’s” – some making valid points, most not, but everybody fighting to climb to the top of Message Mountain.
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So we’ve been reading a lot of news this morning about the ACA SCOTUS ruling, and we’re as floored as probably everyone else is. While everyone was focused on Kennedy, Roberts was the swing vote?? Didn’t see that one coming.

I’ve also been reading a lot of bitching from a variety of people who feel that being required to have health insurance is somehow akin to being thrown into a North Korean prison camp and whipped into submission. Or that the best response to the growing American socialist threat is to move to the Canadian libertarian utopia. Or that somehow self-employed people and small business owners are taking it up the ass on this deal, because they’re being forced to add another line item to their budgets.

Get real, people. We’re self-employed. We have health insurance. It’s expensive. And you know why it’s expensive?

Some of it is the utter inefficiency of the current insurance-driven healthcare model: the blizzard of competing billing codes, the lack of a streamlined and global information management regime, the endless bureaucracy in place to ensure that no one gets the care they really need if it threatens the carrier’s bottom line. That’s not the government at work, though. That’s all the result of the private sector. You can thank the LACK of government involvement for that mess.

But the real reason it’s expensive? If you don’t have insurance, when you inevitably get sick and end up in the emergency room, people like us are paying your bill. No one is arguing that you should be allowed to die on the street outside of the hospital (i.e., denied free market services that you’re not paying for). So by choosing to “exercise your liberty” in the pursuit of your God-given free market rights, you’re being the least “free market” of anybody. You’re counting on government to give you the very handouts that you rail against. You just want someone else to pay for it.

If you want to argue that health care is a basic human right, and that as a result, all American citizens are entitled to “free” health care, fine. What you want is a single payer system, such as that in Canada and the UK. But no, that’s not free healthcare. Everyone pays for it. The doctors’ paychecks have to come from somewhere, and that “somewhere” is called taxes.

Otherwise, if you don’t want government to force you to pay for health insurance, and you don’t want to pay for a single payer system, and you don’t want government handing out free stuff with your tax dollars, then logically you have only one alternative left.

Tell the government to let you die on the street when you need medical attention most.

Problem solved. You’re welcome.