Oh man, I have shut so many people up with the whole "would you sign a waver relinquishing all rights to health care in trade for not signing up" question. It's like that six seconds of silence from a toddler between setting their teddy bear on fire and their bursting into tears, but it lasts.

I'm glad something actually works with these fuckheads.

That said, I do believe our safety net should perform some small services for these people, so I think the federal government should buy every EMS tech a stick with a hook so they can drag libertarians over to the nearest ditch.

I don't know. What would the stick be made of? Plastic is cheap, but the environmental cost could be very high, plus the flimsy plastic failure rate would drive up costs over long term use. Wood and metal would be sturdier, but that requires manufacturing, which may not offset the durability of the device. Asking the EMS workers, who are already overworked, to use their hands is just wrong.

You could use wild animals, but that would cause their population to increase, and what happens if the dead libertarian pool dries up after a generation? Cleanup animals would begin to starve and that's just sad.

We need a tool to vaporize these people on the scene, like a phaser or something. Community incinerators would cause too much pollution.

*GASP!*

Dude... we could convert them to FOOD!!!

I don't know, I've heard that libertarians are pretty gamey, so eating might be out. But we'll need to do something with the bodies; back 100 years ago when we last let our beasts die in the streets, the smells and diseases made cities close to uninhabitable.

... Maybe the same solution will work again? Rather than keep flesh-and-blood libertarians, we can build libertarians out of metal, and just let the organic ones die out over time. And, these all-metal libertarians wouldn't need health care at all! They could simply scavenge among their own kind when they needed spare parts, so eventually there'd be just one cybertarian left, made of spare parts of all the rest.

He was responsible enough to die off camera.

They're two totally different concepts. Of course if you flip flop how you shop for them it's not going to make sense. When I shop for pants, I try them on. When I shop for apples, I don't bite into a few different ones. But what if I bought APPLES the way I bought PANTS?? That wouldn't work! Therefor I shouldn't try on pants.

I worked with the US healthcare system as an interpreter for hispanics who didn't speak English.

99% of these people were a) illegal immigrants, b) did not have medical insurance of any kind, c) came to the hospital ER without any cash or form i.d., d) gave false information as far as their name/address was concerned and e) received medical attention and then left.

Now, my experience was mostly with illegal immigrants, but this option is readily available to ANYONE who doesn't have insurance and costs the hospitals a lot of money. Do people really think that medical facilities are just going to go "oh well, we are spending a lot of money on treating people who just won't pay, we're just going to have to suck it up"?!?

No, they're going to take those costs and average them out and add them ONTO all the other medical services that people ARE paying for. Basically, you are going to pay for them anyway, and since the government is not overseeing this process those same medical facilities are going to screw you over even more just to be on the safe side.

So I really don't understand people going "WELL WHY SHOULD I PAY FOR THESE THINGS ON MY INSURANCE?!?"

You're already paying for them you fucking moron, you should just be thankful for the added level of transparency here.

I'd toss it in his face myself and save Lady Luck the trip.

It's thanks to the wealthy convincing people to vote as if they're going to be future millionaires, not realizing how fucked over they're going to be.

I'm also sick of the whole "but the rich pay most of the taxes" meme without noting that as a percentage of income, it's far lower than what the rest of us pay, and that of course they pay more dollars in taxes because they're FUCKING RICH.

"It's thanks to the wealthy convincing people to vote as if they're going to be future millionaires, not realizing how fucked over they're going to be."

It's not quite that, so much as voting so as to not give the people "below" you any advantages that might allow them to overtake you. And we all know who those people below you are, amirite? Hint: Democrats love giving them welfare, and they lust after our white women.

Nope, that would be the public option that you hear people bitching about (i.e. they're bitching about how we don't have one). We almost got a public option too; the House version of the ACA included a public option and it cleared the House, and was ready to be voted on in the Senate. But Senator Lieberman announced that he would not support any ACA that included a public option, so the ACA that became law of the land was the Senate version, no public option, just lots of restrictions on private insurers.

One more Democratic Senator and we would have had a public option.

Fuck, it's always Liebermann ruining shit for everyone, isn't it? The man is a sewer clot and deserves to be beaten into a coma with his own soapbox.

Reason Today implies they are THE voice of reason in a Society gone mad.

You develop that type of fantasy protagonistic antagonism against the perceived status quo as an avoidance mechanism in order not to cope with the fact that you've become an old, worthless bigot from a bygone era.