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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   28602 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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meat, guns, and weightlifting

Insurance companies care about how much they have to pay out. Their actuaries will compute the cost of being a steak-eating gun owner and determine it is almost nothing. They'll pass that miniscule cost onto their customers. It's not like they're going to fact check you or drop your health insurance because you had two servings of beef rather than one.

To the degree they care about weight lifting or martial arts or other masculine forms of health, I would think they would like it because it makes you cost them less if you are generally healthier.

But sure, they can't discriminate against raw-dogging enthusiasts but can against cigar enthusiasts, so it is a little unfair. But it isn't some insidious plan to punish you for being a stereotypical conservative guy with a weight bench and some guns.

I did say "when they get their public option", which will not be administered by people trying to make a profit. And of course even if it is some public-private abomination like the university system, we've already seen how willing they are to leave consumer money on the table in exchange for other benefits.

Point taken about the lack of profit motive letting government agencies pursue ideological goals rather than finding ways to serve customers while making a profit.

Do you think this public option will refuse to treat me because I own guns and eat meat? What do you think they'll do, have an ideological test to be allowed to buy in and get their medical care?

Opaque metrics filtered through a layer of "equity pricing" for who pays what, justified through procedural manipulation of cost benefit studies. Literally just the usual "make gun and car owners pay for the costs of their abhorrent lifestyles" applied to literally everything.

Isn't it obvious how this sort of thing will work? We've seen so many examples of how this, I can already write the headlines for it (and the National Review's objections as they stumble along behind history, feebly mumbling "slow down")

Insurance companies care about how much they have to pay out. Their actuaries will compute the cost of being a steak-eating gun owner any determine it is almost nothing.

You're talking about things that would happen in a free market economy. Health insurance... is not.

These are private companies and they employ actuaries to do real work. Short of government mandates forcing them to discriminate against stereotypical conservative men, they won't proactively harm their business by dropping you as a customer without financial reasons or charging you wrong.

Sir, over the last decade we've seen private companies ban, debank, and blacklist their customers on several occasions. Doing so either does not hurt their business, or in the event it does, they don't care about it.

Insurance companies fucking with normie conservative men? I think not. A select few extreme wrongthinkers have debanked. The significant minority of Americans who are right leaning men have bank accounts and health insurance like everyone else.

I am disturbed by weaponized debanking such as the Canadian trucker protestors' accounts getting frozen and Operation Chokepoint. But it is very small in magnitude and as-of-yet almost vanishingly rare. As a prediction of risk: this is a very low risk issue. I'm not particularly worried about losing my health insurance because I build ARs.

Again, your average young normie conservative already gets screwed by the existing insurance system. They had to pass a mandate to make us buy it, because otherwise we wouldn't sign up to pay for everyone else's expensive prep, hormones, sex change operations, SSRIs, reiki energy healing sessions, etc.. That was literally in the justifications for the bill:

Young and healthy individuals are needed to balance out higher risk individuals who are likely to become ill and who will be more costly... In essence what the individual mandate effects by converting the uninsured into healthy insurance policy holders is financing the health care of the sick by those who are healthy, what one author calls "health redistribution"

You don't think this is going to get much worse when a public option run by Equity Consultants takes over? I think that's a severe lack of vision.

I am old enough to be politically aware during the creation of Obamacare. I know it is a wealth transfer from relatively young and low-wealth to the old. Also a transfer from working professionals to everyone else. The obviously correct health insurance plan for a young healthy person is a catastrophic-only high-deductible plan. They outlawed that in order to transfer money from people like me to old and poor people.

I'm not saying things are great regarding government legislation of health insurance, but I really doubt that I'll be denied care or rejected from a hypothetical single payer system because of normie conservative lifestyle. Eating meat and driving my car to work and owning guns in my suburban house with my nuclear family.

They'll make me pay quite a bit based on my economic position, but no one is denying me care based on gun ownership or meat consumption. It's economic discrimination, not culture war discrimination.

I can't think of a better example of a normie conservative man than someone who carves walnut gun stocks.

To be very excessively fair, they weren't unbanked, they just had business accounts closed. They still had access to regular personal banking. And Operation Choke Point equally targeted individuals selling porn and other vices. This wasn't anti-conservative but rather anti-whatever-Obama-and-his-staffers-and-Dem-appointees-didn't-personally-like. Which doesn't ease my libertarian heart.

The risk they're concerned with is "will the regulators close my bank", not the sorts of business risk we're supposed to believe they're thinking about.

Yep. Like the actual for-real government conspiracy Operation Chokepoint. A few select gun accessory sellers get their accounts closed and every bank simultaneously decides to not let them open a new account. They aren't risky in any banking sense. Some guy who carves and sells walnut gun stocks isn't a banking risk. But banks want regulators on their side and Obama told the regulators to crack down on small gun accessory businesses, so no banking for the aftermarket stocks guy.

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