The New Shkrelism

This screed was occasioned by a friend's FB status, but the further rhetoric it responds to cannot be attributed to that friend; I'm engaging an imagined (though very real in innumerable Amurkin iterations) combatant. Anyway, the prompt read thus:

"I looked at the Pharma hyper-prices as a Medicaid/insurance scam that backfired. / If everybody is insured and nobody can be dropped for a condition then after the deductible is met the sky is the limit on what to charge, a company or the gov't will pay it (thats the strategy anyway)... / Not agreeing with this strategy at all, would be fine seeing the execs shot but I expect a lot more (though not as obvious/expensive) such business models to come!"

Yes. Unfortunately Capital (and its thronging legion of carefully under-educated, underpaid stooges—see also Maleficent's minions) is perfectly happy with any scenario that provides even easier access to your tax dollars. Pharma and the rest of Health Care have been eyeballing their share greedily for the last half-century as Armaments and Warmaking proved themselves infallibly spill-free (well, except for all that blood) siphons of the American wallet.

But as much as Pharma loves its new easier access to our tax dollars, they would much rather take a step back—after all, Medicaid/Medicare and other federal assistance programs are just that same half-century old themselves—than a step forward to a single-payer system. So here's the part where Capital screams itself hoarse about how this and similar "failures of Obamacare" prove socialist solutions don't work—yes, you heard that right: uber-Capitalist creosote stain Martin Fucking Shkreli proves that socialism doesn't work—and so we need to go back to the Great American Bootstrap where Ronald Reagan lent you a chicken to pay your doctor.

The problem isn't government assistance. The problem is insurance. We grew up being taught to accept the whole concept of insurance as benign if not outright beneficent. "It takes care of you when you need it" and suchlike. Actually, it's one of seven REAL deadly sins—the most evil things humankind has ever done to itself—the other six being religion, slavery, war, advertising, modern country music, and Neti pots). Maybe "healthcare insurance" was initially created to be helpful, but it quickly metastasized into a universal malignancy. And it did so with the full connivance of Capital and Capital's neocon buddies.

Boehner and Obama rehearse the mirror scene from Duck Soup

The example here of Pharma price-gouging is a single, simple, common-sense lesson in economics: NEVER set up a fucking system whereby a group of sellers and a group of buyers are operating in a de facto capitalist market but without any practical economic contact with each other—without any real reference to market value of products and services. Universal insuredness ENSURES [ahem: with an 'e'] artificiality of market value. Obamacare doesn't do anything for the health care of Americans except patch the holes where everybody's tax dollars might have leaked out. It hones and perfects exactly the sort of vacuum Martin Shkreli so jauntily moved to exploit. Shkreli's sin was not his actions per se but rather how far he stretched the system and his LOLling insouciance about it. Capital was all, like: "Dude, knock it off. You're drawing attention. People are noticing."

But what people were noticing and screaming about is exactly the corporate behavior which Big Healthcare had been practicing for decades—just done cartoonishly big—and which they continue to refine and perfect under the Affordable Care Act.

Read up on Mr. Nixon's Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973 if you're interested in the precise moment Big Healthcare first jizzed in their pants. Mr. Obama, like all good corporate capitalists, duly painted his new installment with a bright blue HOPE logo and sold it to what passes, embarrassingly, for liberals in this country. The flashing red lights and angry hollering was all side-show—well, mostly side-show; scaremongering about socialism remains itself a lucrative racket—but everybody that counted knew it was (a) an inevitability and (b) a blank check for industry printed up to look like a big Band-aid.

"And here we have a textbook example of obligatory payment..."

So with an entire nation trained to ignore Insurance itself as an immutable feature of the landscape, and struggling to make do with their shriveling paychecks, is it any surprise that the most common response to the New Shkrelism is "See? That's what we get for handing out government assistance instead of MAKING AMURKINS TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEMSELVES like our parents and grandparents did!"

We are an evil people. I don't know why that is; I don't know how we came to this pass; but America is a fucking wasting disease.