Republicans Are Bringing Healthcare For The Working Class Back To The 19th Century In Practice Though Hardly In Cost

A MEMBER OF MY FAMILY,  close but not immediate, has died, uninsured, of a matter that could have been likely cured by a dose of antibiotics.   He deferred treatment for the simple reason that he couldn't afford to go to the doctor another time this year.  He was middle aged with two children and others who are devastated by his death.  He had hidden his condition from everyone as he tried to treat it himself, he didn't want to burden his family with even that significant but relatively modest cost.   

I used to babysit him when he was a child.  He was an ornery little kid but adulthood improved him enormously.   He was a good father and son to his parents and brother to his siblings.    

His sudden death has affected me deeply but I can see that there is someone to blame for it,  it's the goddamned Republicans who, first in the Roberts Court weakened the Affordable Care Act through his declaration that the Medicaid expansion requirement on the states was unconstitutional.  The Republican ruled state he lived in didn't do much of anything in that direction.  His inability to pay was a direct consequence of that decision by John Roberts who has to bear responsibility for such deaths that his choice caused.    Though the original weakening of the Act, itself, so that Barack Obama could try to, unsuccessfully coax Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe to vote for it so he could declare it was "bipartisan" and Rahm Emanuel's deal with big Pharma to keep their profits up played a role, too.  If he had lived in Canada,  cost would have been no issue at all.   

I remember when the debate over the ACA was going on,  a Canadian commented that the original Canadian healthcare law was only a few pages long whereas,  catering to private insurance and hospital corporations in the typical American way  the ACA was close to a thousand pages long.   Our Constitutional system, especially as distorted by the Supreme Court in things like its "corporate person-hood" bullshit gets us killed at an earlier age,  sometimes of horrific, agonizing conditions that are routinely cured in other countries.   There is a reason that in healthcare,  the rich get top level care,  most of us get something closer to what the poor can get in developing countries.   Lots of us get to die prematurely.   

And the Republican's most recent destruction of it haven't kicked in yet.