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Notes -
I think the more amazing thing is that we had this huge healthcare reform and if the insurance companies were regulated before, they are hyper-regulated now, and yet almost no people pay any attention to any role the regulators play in the system. I mean for all people eager to murder healthcare CEOs, at least some percent of them should direct equal hate to their local congress-critter whose stuff literally wrote most of the rules the CEOs play by (and whose campaign is financed by the same CEO, too). Yet nobody is even trying to think in that direction and link the huge achievement of Obamacare with the present state of healthcare market. It's like they brain run on KamalaOS 1.0 - "we made absolutely no mistakes and we need to fix everything urgently!".
Also, twitter haters probably occupy much smaller part of the real world that one might think when opening twitter.
The problem is, it's not the "local congress-critter" that actually wrote the regulation, it is, as you note, their staff (I'm pretty sure that's what you meant, and "stuff" was a typo or autocorrupt). Taking out a congressman is probably harder than taking out a CEO, and it likely leaves his replacement inheriting that staff.
And you can't change things by taking out the staffers, because while they may have less physical security, it's compensated by their obscurity — first, you have to figure out who they even are. Second is their numbers — taking out just one of them won't do much. Third is their replaceability — they're even more interchangeable than politicians.
(You can't stop the Machine by popping a few expendable human cogs within it. You've got to demolish the entire institution.)
yes
I'm not calling to murder congresscritters, Heavens forbid (neither their staff of course). But at least we may want to discuss their part of the responsibility for the problem, if we perceive it to be the problem? Given that I would define it as "very large" - they have the means to form the system, and they formed the current system as it is now, and they have the power to change it. A single healthcare CEO could probably hire marginally better customer support, and make the rules marginally less strict, but within given regulations and 4% average profit margins, they don't have much space for a radical change.
You mean the glorious proletarian revolution? If past experiments teach us anything, it's that proletarian healthcare is not going to be better. As somebody who experienced both, I'd like to personally confirm this.
No. Absolutely not. When I spoke of demolishing institutions, I wasn't referring to the health insurance industry, I'm referring to the institution of Congressional aides. Of "legislators" who don't actually legislate.
Why? To what end? If you want to fix the portion of the health industry problem for which Congress is responsible, you have to "fix" Congress. But, like so much of the US Federal government, the only way to "fix" Congress is to tear it out and replace it with something else. As you note, health care CEOs "don't have much space for a radical change"… and if "radical change" is what you want, the only way we're getting it is overthrowing the United States Government.
So no, I don't mean a "glorious proletarian revolution" in healthcare. The opposite direction, really. The glorious Caesarist reaction when we finally get our Augustus, who ends the Republic.
For example, nobody is angry at this guy: https://x.com/OcrazioCornPop/status/1868084582425170121 - who openly admits at passing healthcare policy by deception, and now we are witnessing the fruits of his labors. Nobody even remembers he existed - and he will be writing the next "healthcare reform", whatever it is, and one after that - or somebody who is exactly like him. Did you ever hear discussing anything about that anywhere in MSM or among those internet people that this week are all healthcare experts?
Yes, and? What do you want here?
Suppose indeed that people were angry at Gruber; that there was less anger directed at healthcare CEO, and more at policy architects like this guy. So what? What would it accomplish? Gruber, or someone like him, would still be making these policies. You complain that "will be writing the next "healthcare reform", whatever it is, and one after that - or somebody who is exactly like him," but even if you got your way and people were "directing equal hate to their local congress-critter", that would still be true.
It is the nature of Congress, as it currently exists, to do this sort of thing. And Congress, like most institutions these days, cannot be fixed, only replaced. You don't want Gruber, "or somebody who is exactly like him" writing the next "healthcare reform"? Then start working to overthrow the US government, because that's the only way it happens. Anything else is just pointless venting.
Hopefully, reframing the conversation from "greedy capitalists kill grandmas" to "healthcare policy matters and we must pay a lot of attention to it and demand much better from The Experts (TM) and relentlessly shame those who dared to lie to us and lead us to the mess we have, and demand from the future ones to be candid with us and provide solutions that look better".
I hope that if by some miracle we found in ourselves, as a society, a way to move conversation from murdering CEOs to discussing policies, then we could also find a way to improve those policies or at least have people en masse understand what those policies are and what are their consequences, so it won't be as easy for the next Gruber to deceive people. I don't exactly expect it, but I hope.
Replaced with what? How? The founders of the current government have done a lot of work to lay the philosophical and practical foundations of the system now in place. It is true that it has diverged from the original intent significantly, but at least if we proclaim as a goal to return to that, we may rely on that work to understand what has to be done and why. What is your foundations and where you want to move, beyond destroying the US government?
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So that sometime, somewhere, somehow we could eventually learn to associate the problems we have with the people we appoint to solve those problems who instead cause even worse problems, and then maybe, just maybe, we start trying to realize maybe there's a better way to do things than just giving all the power to whoever looks most slick on TV and then murdering random rich people because it feels good. They way to solving the problem must go through at least seeing the problem, and I am observing just the opposite - a giant effort to avoid any hint of looking in the general direction of the problem.
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