Wow, it’s been a little while, eh? Time for some cheese blogging.

Today we have a lovely little Wisconsin cheddar, from Carr Valley.

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Above the post update: Wow. I have had this sitting in my review queue for ages. Here, have a cheese blog:

Today’s cheese I picked out for one reason and one reason only, purely on impulse:

By the pound, it’s the most expensive cheese I’ve ever had.

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So, apparently the Senate Combined Health bill is apocalyptically bad. I haven’t had much time to read it myself yet, but the early reviews are awful.

Let’s see, what’s wrong with it?

Well, to start with, it restores 50 million a year for abstinence only education. Which doesn’t work, of course. But who ever let a little thing like evidence get in the way of law? (At least, when it involves a handout to a religious group.)

Granted, 50 mil a year is peanuts. I’d gladly put a provision in the bill to give 50 billion to the Catholic Church if they’d shut their gob and keep out of US politics from now on.

It doesn’t stop insurance companies from selling insurance the way they do now, outside the exchange (except they can’t practice rescission or use pre-existing conditions). Which means that they don’t *have* to take anyone new. They can refuse to participate in the Exchange and turn down the subsidies, if they feel like it, and just price anyone they don’t want out of the individual market. Which means that the public option gets stuck in the Exchange taking ALL the sick people the Insurers don’t want.

That Public Option is an opt-out too. Which means that the idiot red states won’t get it. Now, I’m actually in favor of handing a gun to these redneck mouthbreathers and letting them blow their brains out, but it will cost us money in the long run. Well worth it, but still, costly.

The ‘Free Rider’ provision is in here, which means poor people won’t be able to get hired for a job. See, it works like this: if you, as a business, have an employee poor enough to get subsidies in the Exchange, you get fined. Thus, you have a strong financial incentive not to hire poor people. You’d much rather hire the teenage son or daughter of a local rich family, who has health insurance and doesn’t need Exchange credits, than the poor single mom who needs that paycheck to keep a roof over her head. Isn’t that swell?

It also guts all state regulations on insurance by letting insurers sell ‘national plans’ across state lines. This is a huge wet kiss to Cigna and United Health. Now, if your pesky state has rules they don’t want to follow, they don’t have to; they just move their PO box/headquarters to some uncivilized state full of knuckle-dragging savages (like Alabama) and presto, your laws no longer apply to them!

The credit card companies got the same deal a few years back. Boy, it’s pleasant dealing with them now that they’re de-regulated, huh? What’s that? There’s a desperate scramble to regulate them again? Gee, couldn’t see THAT ONE COMING.

It also screws over undocumented immigrants, who can’t buy insurance on the exchange, even without subsidies, with their own cash. Instead, they go to the emergency room, costing us 10 times the amount, or die. Or both! Great idea.

I talked in my last big post about Actuarial Value, the percentage of your expected, average health care costs that an insurance plan covers. Members of Congress get between 84-87%, meaning, on average, for every dollar of health care they’re billed for each year, they pay 13-16 cents.

In this Senate bill, the minimum value is 60%. You’d pay 40 cents, not their 13.

But fuck, you’re just a poor working class schlub. You deserve to be penalized for being poor; it’s obviously the judgment of God for your sins. We’re such a Calvinist country.

Finally, the ball doesn’t get rolling on the Exchange until 2014. FOUR MORE YEARS LIKE THIS.

Haha, oh God, what an unholy mess, and it’s all our fault.

This bill is so bad that the good folks at FDL are calling for it to die, and for the Senate, our own personal House of Lords, filibuster and elitism and all, to die right along with it.

Me, I see this as justice. This is what we wanted, as Americans. A system where no one has to pay attention, or think, or deal with empirical reality, where they can drown themselves in bible thumping and American Idol, where individual avarice and selfish greed has been elevated to holy ritual, and people with money are allowed to do whatever they want, because of the delusional belief that everybody will some day be rich. This, my friends, is American Democracy at its finest.

And H.L. Mencken said it best:

“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”