Let me start off by saying that I do not believe that Ann Coulter is a stupid woman. She’s actually extremely intelligent and quite accomplished. So why does she perpetually say and write the stupidest things I’ve ever heard? Because her hateful persona mixed with her republican tunnel vision makes any sort of rational thinking almost impossible, thereby negating the intelligence she was born with.
I read her latest article here.
Almost everything that she says here is a fantasy. I can’t tell if she’s genuinely ignorant of the facts, or if she’s making a concerted effort to mislead. In either case, I’m going to set the dumb bitch straight!
But let me start by giving her credit for making a good point; insurance shouldn’t have an antitrust exemption. These exemptions kill competition and give business an advantage over consumers that they shouldn’t have.
Okay, enough of that. Now on to ripping her a new one.
Let’s start with this statement;
"The very next sentence of my bill provides that the exclusive regulator of insurance companies will be the state where the company’s home office is. Every insurance company in the country would incorporate in the state with the fewest government mandates, just as most corporations are based in Delaware today."
This is a little vague. Is this a federal regulator? This would be nonsense if it were a state regulator, so I have to assume that she talking about a federal regulator. A FEDERAL REGULATOR? She wants to regulate insurance in a federal level? Interesting. Where have I heard that before?
Let’s move onto this little nugget of stupid:
"That’s the only way to bypass idiotic state mandates, requiring all insurance plans offered in the state to cover, for example, the Zone Diet, sex-change operations, and whatever it is that poor Heidi Montag has done to herself this week."
Does Ann really think that your premiums are high because your insurance company assumes that you’re going to get a sex change tomorrow? How much does she think premiums will go down by if you assure your insurance company that you like the parts you came with and have no intentions of rerouting the plumbing? This is where she obviously knows better, but needs to make shit up in order to make a point. Insurance doesn’t cover sex changes or plastic surgery. She would have had that Adam’s apple removed a LONG time ago if it did!
I really LOVE this little morsel of obtuse;
"Much as I admire Obama’s use of terminally ill human beings as political props, let me point out here that perhaps Natoma could have afforded insurance had she not been required by Ohio’s state insurance mandates to purchase a plan that covers infertility treatments and unlimited OB/GYN visits, among other things. It sounds like Natoma could have used a plan that covered only the basics — you know, things like cancer."
Insurance contracts are already entirely too complicated for most people to understand. I know, because I assess and design corporate insurance plans so my friends naturally come to me with questions about their coverage. Their eyes generally start to glaze over before I’ve even made a dent in answering their questions. How does Ann think health insurance contracts are going to look when you start to increase the already growing slew of exclusions? She wants more language to the already overly complicated insurance policies? Seriously? And does she think that maybe, MAYBE an explicit exclusion for cosmetic surgery may also exclude skin cancer treatment for example?
This one definitely tops the list of partisan, nonsense bullshit in Ann’s article;
"The third sentence of my bill would prohibit the federal government from regulating insurance companies, except for normal laws and regulations that apply to all companies."
Yes Ann, because deregulation has worked out SO well for us with the financial industry. Let’s spread the joy around until it metastasizes into your lymph nodes and kills you due to an inability to get treatment!
She goes on and on about some nonsense about pre-existing conditions, blah, blah, blah. I didn’t read anything that looked like a solution to this problem in her lunatic ravings, so I’m not even going to waste time on it.
I do want to address one more thing. This republican "nirvana" of tort reform. They’re completely full of shit when they offer this up as being the solution to all of our health insurance problems, and they KNOW it.
Texas passed a law limiting malpractice awards to $250,000 several years ago. Today Texas has the honor of being the state with 3 of the top 10 most expensive cities in America to purchase insurance in (McAllen, Harlingen and Corpus Christi). Now keep in mind that Texas is also one of the top 10 most obese states in the country, so I think it would be fair to conclude that cutting pork without cutting out the bacon isn’t really going to help solve our health care cost issues! But still, this is hardly a ringing endorsement for the power of tort reform to impact much of anything. In 2004, the Congressional Budget Office released a report estimated the cost of medical malpractice at 2% of the total health care spending. Again, 2% doesn’t sound like a game changing number to me.
Republicans know all of this. I sincerely wish that they would come up with a fact based solution of their own. As a citizen of this country, I hate to be put in the position of having only one party working to solve our problems. I think that having several fact based approaches, coming from different points of the ideological spectrum isn’t too much to ask for in the "greatest country in the world".
Come on republicans, apply yourselves!
For republicans to offer up real, fact based solutions, they'll first have to actually want to change anything. The only reason they want to do tort reform is because it saves the insurance companies money, ie the rich get richer.
The emphasis on so-called ‘tort reform’ (which is really a further bailout of the insurance industry and a bid for further blanket corporate immunity) totally side-steps the fact that while around 40K individuals die each year from lack of access to healthcare, probably another 150K (or more) die from the care that they RECEIVE.