Although I’m personally very vocal about my dislike and distrust of the Affordable Care Act, I don’t think I’ve ever come out and stated my reasons for it.  The first, I have to admit, is resentment over how the nearly-one-thousand-page bill was passed through congress and shoved down Americans throats.  If you don’t remember, the first version was drafted within the first three months of Obama’s Presidency, with heavy input from pharmaceutical and hospital companies.  Then, for nearly two years, our congressmen and senators spent almost every waking moment telling us to roll over and take it, evading questions about what it really meant (they didn’t know, none of them read it), and assuring us that it was not—well, they assured us it was not a lot of things without actually telling us what it was; they were a lot like Muslims trying to describe God.  Finally, they passed the bill in an eleventh-hour session in 2010, just before a solid percentage of those who championed the bill found themselves out of work.  They had to cut deals with a Republican Senator to get the watershed vote, despite the Democrats holding a supermajority in the Senate (that’s right—all the talk about Republican obstructionism ignores the fact that at least one-fifth of Senate Democrats had listened to their constituents and voted against the bill).

So, yeah, I have an issue with that.  It seems like they took all their lawmaking lessons from the corrupt Senators in Mr Smith Goes to Washington.  But that isn’t the only reason I have issues.  I have deep personal issues with the individual mandate.  Forcing Americans to purchase a personal product has always been a problem for me.  Forcing Americans to invest in a financial instrument is beyond concerning to me, and make no mistake, insurance is a financial instrument.  In its purest form, insurance is a limited savings account that allows people to save money toward a crisis or an eventuality.  In its modern form, insurance is a lottery, a deadpool where you throw money and hope to god you never come up a winner, because winning that bet means something horrible has happened.  It’s no accident that prior to the ACA, the only form of insurance required by law in the United States was automotive liability insurance.  You have to have proof of your ability and willingness to meet your responsibilities if you accidentally cause harm to another person.  That is a reasonable requirement.  It is not reasonable to require people to pay into a money pool that really makes the problem worse.

Because lack of insurance has never been the problem with medical care in the United States.  Until very recently, all but catastrophic and chronic medical care were reasonably priced.  In fact you can track the insane inflation in medical treatment and tie it to the spread of insurance.  It’s a simple fact of economics: the more available something is, the less value it has.  Insurance made money for medical treatments ubiquitous, and thus, nearly valueless to the point that even minor treatments demanded huge sums.

And therein lies the actual problem with America’s medical industry, the problem that the ACA doesn’t even pretend to address.  The industry is awash in rampant inflation, monopolistic practices, and unregulated billing procedures.  Pharmaceutical companies blame the high price of medications on research and development, but they fail to mention that the “development” part of that phrase is mostly multi-billion dollar ad campaigns designed to convince the credulous that they have a condition that can be treated by the company’s designer drug.

Anyone who’s ever had to visit a hospital in the past ten years can tell you that their billing practices are insane.  Heck, my last visit to a hospital was nearly twenty years ago, and I remember one charge on my bill fairly clearly:  $35 for a disposable stapler (for stapling my cut ankle shut).  Except that it had presumably been run through an autoclave before being sealed in plastic, there was no difference between this stapler and a five-dollar desk stapler available at the grocery store.  It even said “Swingline” on the side.  And that was when Insurance payment caps had teeth.

My daughter went to a local hospital (a “charity” hospital that does several billion dollars of business every year and profits so well that they have built multi-million dollar, full-service “branch” hospital throughout the area) for an outpatient procedure.  The hospital billed her for the amount the insurance company refused to pay.  Then she received bills from a whole slew of hospital subcontractors.  For nearly a year, she was receiving new bills from companies and individuals she had no idea had been even marginally involved in her procedure.  Some of them didn’t even bother to bill her, but went straight to a collection agency without notifying her that she “owed” them money.

That’s how people go bankrupt and end up homeless due to medical bills.  And before you business apologists start on a rant about high malpractice insurance rates, let me assure you that those rates are high not because of litigation abuse, but because there are an amazing number of truly AWFUL doctors who continue to practice medicine despite having a body count higher than a Jason Statham movie.

And the shame of it is that the ACA doesn’t even address these issues.  Nowhere is reasonable, or even standardized pricing for medical care addressed in any portion of the act that claims in its very title to be all about Affordable Care.  Pharmaceutical and medical technology companies get a pass.  Hospital conglomerates get a pass.  Even the insurance companies get a bone in the guarantee of millions of new customers.

And the problem gets worse because you can’t stop the fiduciary abuses of the entities responsible for making our healthcare system untenable by throwing more money at them. Get a  lot of money and start to learn about vape franchise opportunities. That’s like punishing a schoolyard bully by making all the other kids give him their candy and lunch money.  But that’s what the ACA does.  It makes more money available for drugs that treat almost nothing (and have a laundry list of insane side effects), for hospitals that gut the unwell (then throw the carcass of their accounts to the crows), and for bureaucrats, both public and private, who have no other honest means of making a buck.

Call it the ACA.  Call it Obamacare.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s abominable, and it needs to be repealed.

There is a petition out, I guess it’s on President Obama’s lame-duck relevance site, “Change .Org”, to destroy the Confederate Monument at Stone Mountain, Georgia.  Like everything else that reminds people that the Civil War was a thing, the Stone Mountain Memorial pisses people off because it reminds people that the Civil War and slavery were things in American History, and, specifically, in Georgian History.  Not that Georgia needed any reminders; only the tech boom and Atlanta’s lax enforcement of zoning codes allowed the state to crawl out from the rubble left behind by Sherman’s March to the Sea 120 years earlier.

So, yeah, the Stone Mountain Memorial, which was paid for with private money and built on private land (which was subsequently donated to the Stat of Georgia) is a horrible affront to everyone who thinks…I’m not sure…slavery something, and we could probably work in a “worse than Hitler.”  Of course, if we’re going to blast that off the Mountain, we should probably give the hairy eye to a few other large monuments around the country.  The San Jacinto Monument, the Goliad Memorial, and the Alamo, all mark events in the Texas Revolution—an event that was (according to some modern historians) an obvious land grab by the US in order to expand slavery (never mind that Texas won that war on its own and wasn’t even permitted to join the Union until 5 years later with the promise that the newly admitted state would handle its own debts), knock ’em down…put up a Gap or something.  Mount Rushmore sits on land formerly sacred to certain Souix (okay, Souix is a generalized term that means “enemy,” but there is no other word that encompasses the many Algonquin tribes that ruled the northern plains in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries), and the nearby Crazy Horse Memorial is insulting (Native American cultures consider it an insult to point with their fingers, and more so that he’s using his left arm).  I could go on, but I won’t.  Basically, if you have a petition and enough dynamite, there’s apparently a lot of work to be done.

I have safe money that a large number of the organizers and signatories of this petition were among the voices telling people to “get over it” when the hubbub surrounding the Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero occurred.  That is, of course, neither here nor there.  Hypocrisy is a problem in America, and in human culture in general, but it is not the focus of today’s article.  Today, we’re going to talk about offense.

Now, I’m not one of those people who subscribes to the erroneous notion that offense can only ever be taken.  Some words and actions are so foul that they can be nothing but offensive.  Most states have a “fighting words” defense, so the law sort of bears me out, since “fighting words,” means that there are some things that can be said for which there is no reasonable response except to beat the speaker like an old drum.

To be fair, “fighting words” are pretty clearly defined, and, in most cases, come within spitting distance of actual assault (a credible verbal threat of bodily harm).  So it’s not like “Yo’ Momma” jokes can be considered fighting words.

But are they, by their nature offensive?  On the off-chance that your mother is actually so fat that when she sits around the house, she sits around the house, I’m going to say, that some people may take offense, but that, while insulting, the statement itself is not offensive.  At least no more offensive than Lucky the Leprechaun, that obsessive little sugar addict who’s been the primary representative of Irish-American Culture for the last fifty years.  Let us, then, look at the SMM and determine what about it makes it offensive.

The Stone Mountain carving depicts three men on horseback, pictured from about the waist up (Lee, in the forefront, is shown from the knee up), facing east.  All three men are sad, and even a little regretful, when one studies their features.  From left to right, they are, Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.  J.E.B. Stuart is not depicted shaking his fist in defiance and rallying his newly-formed Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, nor is there any depiction of the horrifying destruction wrought on the State of Georgia by Sherman’s strategically-necessary scorched-earth policy.  For a United Daughters of the Confederacy project, the Monument is remarkably subdued:  just three regretful men, looking east.

So, it is not, in and of itself, offensive.  Its presence on the mountain and the sad looks presented on the faces of its subjects can be interpreted in ways that might be considered offensive by some, but it is not even in the same league, in terms of intrinsic inappropriateness, with Aunt Jemima or the Cleveland Indians mascot.  Heck, it’s not even as intrinsically offensive as the use of the Swastika, and that was a good luck symbol for a thousand years before the Nazis painted it with hatred and murder.

The thing is, if we want to remain a free society, we have to stop thinking with our guts, our hearts and our genitals, and re-learn how to think with our heads.  It’s stupid to get our panties in a wad every time we see or hear something that we personally find offensive, but it’s easy.  Freedom isn’t easy; it requires work and thought.  To be a responsible member of a free society, you have to take the two seconds necessary to look at things from someone else’s perspective.  You have to ask yourself, “Is this meant to be offensive, or did I just get my back up, because it struck the wrong chord in me?”

The US population is a mix of every culture present on the planet, and we must keep ourselves aware that things we may view as offensive may be seen as harmless to others.  When someone wishes you “Happy Holidays,” they are not trying to eradicate your god or undermine your faith.  It’s not racist to say that you think the President is set on a dangerous course, no matter who that President is.  The Islamic Cultural Center in New York was not planned as a Tea Bag for the Ground Zero victims, and the UDC did not commission the SMM as a big “Fuck You!” to anyone.

Get over it.  Very few people do or say anything specifically to piss you off.  Most of the time they aren’t thinking about you at all, but have their own concerns instead.  Save the uproar for something worth the effort.