Thursday, February 23, 2017

Why Meheeeeeeko Won't Honor the Border



Have you ever wondered why Meheeeeko won't seem to honor the border between our two sovereign nations?  

Me too.

So I did a little digging, which is what any good quasi-journalist-without-portfolio or formal training of any kind would do when faced with an existential question like this. And I came up with the answer. And here it is...

Meheeeeeeeeeeko (I mean, that's how you pronounce it, right?) is still pissed over the outcome and resolution of the Mexican-American War.  As you may recall, unless you went to a public school and thus did not learn anything, ended with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, circa 1848.  That's the piece of paper that gave us (we took it from them) all of what was then called "Alta California."  Or "Aztlan," as some of them prefer to call it.  That means everything north of the current border, all the way up to just past San Francisco, over eastward past Utah and Nevada and Colorado, down southeast-ward through Kansas and a bit of Oklahoma, and all the way through to Brownsville, Texas.  

In other words, a major, major chunk of real estate which they wanted to keep and we wanted to get in order to sort of fill out what is currently thought of as "America."

They really liked that choice bunch of land.  Remember, they actually sent Spanish padres up the coast to build missions and plant vineyards and herd cows and goats and sheep and convert the Indians.  They colonized it, and carved out vast swaths of it to farm and produce veggies and grain and send it back home to where the land is quite a bit less arable.

They were upset to lose it.  Too bad, we said.  To the victor goes the spoils, we said. And we were the victors.  They shouldn't have picked the fight in the first place, we said, what with raiding parties of killers and rapists and robbers and burglars marauding all willy nilly into what was then a territory known as "Texas." Remember the Alamo?  Couldn't resist.  

To be sure, they actually disagree; they said we provoked the conflagration. Who knows?  Anyway, many of us said they were damned lucky we didn't take the entire toilet of a country and simply annex it as an official state.  Or at least a protectorate. That "many of us," by the way, would include me, The Chuckmeister.  

Just imagine how much trouble we could have saved ourselves if we have simply made Mexico a part of the good ol' U.S. of A.  Think Puerto Rico, if you doubt me.  P.R. is a "protectorate" of America, which means they get to offload their poor here anytime they want to, and take advantage of our laws and benefits and welfare state.  And we get to send them boatloads of money, anytime they need it, which is waaaay too often, BTW. 

Meheeeeeeko, on the other hand, gets to export its poor northward with abandon, who then take advantage of our laws and our benefits and our welfare state, but without an "official" stamp of approval.  And that's what we're all talking about these days, and what will consume a major portion of our legislative and diplomatic activities during the first couple of years of the Trump Administration.

But why, one might ask, is Meheeeeeeko so unwilling to assist us in stopping the flood of illegals who make their way to "El Norte" night and day, and have for generations? Because, my silly friends, they didn't like the outcome of the War, and because they're going to punish us any way they can for as long as they can, just because they can.

Look at a map.  That "line" between our two countries isn't called a "border" on their maps.  It's called "La Frontera," the Frontier.  So, they don't feel bad about casually forcing themselves upon us by violating our border, because they don't consider it a "border."  It's just a minor inconvenience on their way to a better life.  Think of a muddy stream through which they must wade.  They're leaving a giant, draconian, medieval fiefdom, controlled by 500 super-rich, uber-powerful and -connected families who dole out plumb jobs and positions and titles like Christmas presents to their friends and political associates, and where those without that "ooomph" toil night and day just to keep a few tortillas on the dinner table.  Everything there is controlled to the benefit of the "haves," and to the detriment of the "have nots."  That includes jobs and educational opportunities, and almost everything else.  That's why their people are so damned anxious to get out of there and come here.  And why they're so unwilling to help us avoid their rejects, their nobodies, their otherwise welfare recipients.

I don't blame them, by the way.  If I was so unfortunate as to have been born there, I would do anything in my power to get out of there ASAP.  However, I feel the same way about North Korea.  In either case, it's illegal.  And, as Sonny Bono once said, when asked what he thought about illegal immigration, he said:  "It's illegal, isn't it?"  Hard to argue with that sort of simple logic, even coming from a guy never accused of having a ton of what's called tremendous brain power.

And yet, there are those of us here in 'Murica who warmly embrace illegal immigration as good, good, good.  An example would be California State Senator Kevin DeLeon, Majority Leader Pro Tempore.  He stated quite proudly the other day, in session, by the way, on camera, that "half of his family are here illegally."  And that "...they had phony green cards and Social Security numbers and driver's licenses" which enabled them to blend right in to our soon-to-be-declared "sanctuary state."  Nice.  When the third most powerful politician in California is bragging about violating America's immigration laws, you can understand how more than 5 million illegals got here, and why they're not planning on going back anytime soon.

If you Google "population of Mexico," your 'puter will tell you "122.3 million."  Of course, that doesn't draw a distinction between the number there, and the number of those who should be there, who are nonetheless here.  And further Googling will tell you "11.7 million" Meheeeeeekanos are here.  So, that means roughly 9% of Meheeeeeeko's population are living in El Norte.  And these are the folks that Meheeeeeeko would have to be supporting if they hadn't made the trip north, violated our border, broke our laws, and stolen our jobs.  Annnnnnnd, my friends, these are the folks who are regularly sending home, back to momma and the kids in Cuernavaca and Guadalajara what's called "remittances."  That's a fancy term for "money." That's money that Meheeeeeeeko counts as a part of its gross national product.  That's the second largest piece of Meheeeeeeeko's income, just behind oil production.  And if we build a wall, and make it tougher for their exported poor to come here illegally, and work illegally, and send home money illegally, then Meheeeeeeeeko would have to find some other source of income to replace this yuuuuuuuuge loss.  

How much?  $25,000,000,000 a year!  That's Twenty Five Billion Dollars a Year! That's some serious pesos, my friends! 

So, perhaps you now know why Meheeeeeeeko is so dead-set on not honoring our immigration laws.  Think of it.  They have trenches dug all across their southern borders, connecting to El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras.  In those trenches are soldiers with machine guns.  And they will shoot anyone with extreme prejudice who tries to invade Meheeeeeeeko without official permission.  And if you manage to somehow get in without them killing you, and they find you later, they'll throw your ass in prison for two years. And then they'll deport you after you get out, IF you're still kicking, that is.  

And what happens if you come back after then being deported?  Ten years in their very worst, nastiest and most dangerous prison.  Good luck living through that.  And these people bitch and moan about how badly we treat their cast off peons who stream north trying to find a job and something to eat.

Oh, and don't forget if you're a foreigner, even one with permission to be there, you can't pilot a plane or engineer a train or helm a ship or serve in the military or be elected to a political office or own property on or near a body of water or buy a gun or picket or protest or vote.  And a whole bunch of other stuff.  Yeah, they treat their "visitors" with respect.  

Right...

So here's the deal:  They are giving us the finger, each and every day.  They don't give a damn what we think about them screwing us deeply.  They are encroaching upon our sovereignty, and couldn't care less.  They're using us and our sense of humanity to feed, clothe and educate their poor. A Heritage Foundation study from 2015 showed graphically that illegal immigration costs us, the American taxpayers, more than $54.5 Billion Dollars a Year!  That would pay for picking a whole lot of tomatoes, my friends.

And then they have the absolute gall to get all up in our faces, so to speak, when we ask them to help pay for their failures as a country while expecting us to do for their poor what they either cannot, or will not.  Either way, with apologies to Yoda, up with this we shall no longer put.

My idea?  And it's certainly not new.  Build the wall.  Beef up our border patrol and ICE agent rolls to the point where we can actually handle the flood of illegals.  Take over old department stores and Federal buildings and turn them into interment camps for illegals for processing and deportation preparations.  And then summarily deport those who are here illegally and are proven felons and criminals.  And those who return, build enough prisons to make them wish they had not. Cease sending Federal monies to cities who refuse to reverse their "sanctuary" policies.  Begin to push the idea that a country without a border is not a country.  Pay our own veterans and homeless and poor and those who can't find gainful employment and welfare recipients whatever it takes to pick our fruit and wash our cars and clean our homes. Just think how much we could save by not having to pay for the flotsam and jetsam of our neighbor to the south's failed feudal society.  

Yeah, just think...

Saturday, February 18, 2017

More Proof of California Craziness...


If you live in California it would be a good idea if you just keep on doing what you were doing and stop reading right here.

That's because reading this posting will remind you once again just how unfortunate you are to live in the once-Golden State.

Why?  Because the crazies in charge of this insane asylum seem to make it a point to come up with the weirdest, strangest, most inane and unworkable ideas and then turn them into law.  Examples?  Sure...

Plastic bags are now illegal, except that they're not...

So go to work or to the beach or to the grocery store, where you'll now have to pay for what used to be a free plastic bag, which is no longer free, because that will somehow help to "save the planet."  Yep, actual voters here actually voted to reduce the number of plastic bags in the landfill.  And that will happen by you no longer receiving a free bag in which to lug home your food stuffs from Grubbies' Grocery Giant.  Of course, you can  BUY a plastic bag, the very SAME plastic bag, from the very SAME store, for $0.10 if you so choose. So how does this help the planet?  Don't know.  But it sure makes for a new profit source for your local grocer.  Does this make any sense at all, to anyone, anywhere?  

Anyway, now that we've gotten rid of Californians, who value the weather here more then they do their wallet or their jobs or their health care or their sanity, the rest of you should sit down, grab an expensive snifter of a silber reposado anejo Tequila and prepare to laugh out loud.   

Okay.  Ready?  Here goes.  Regular readers of this unassuming little blog will know that I make it a point to report on all the dumbass laws the liberal elites who own and manage the State from that backwater town known as Sacramento just luuuuuuv to pass.  We have some of the stupidest, most ludicrous, ridiculous, painful, restrictive and completely unworkable laws than you could even imagine. But now those brain-dead bozos have gone and passed a few new ones that just defy the imagination. And here they are...

You!  With the fireplace!  Up against the wall!

Because burning wood, and presumably anything else, contributes to "global warming," or "climate change," or "climate chaos," or whatever they choose to call it tomorrow in an effort to scare the bejeezus out of us, the "sheeple," the idiots in charge have just made it illegal to burn wood in your wood-burning fireplace if your little warmth-provider is located at an altitude of 3,000 feet or below.  "Really," you might ask? Yes, really. That's because the "Air Quality Management District," which consists of a dozen or so appointed bureaucrats who get paid tons of money to meet every three or four months for an hour or so and then head on out to an expensive luncheon, and who report directly to the "Air Resources Board," which consists of a dozen or so highly-paid bureaucrats who meet every three or four months to talk about the weather and then head on out to an expensive luncheon, has decided that our air quality at lower altitudes is not so good.  And that burning that log in your fireplace would make the situation worse.  Yes, really.  

Oh, and don't try to burn one of those fake-ass, waxy four-hour logs either! They're illegal as well.  Your fine for violating these laws against God and nature, or at least nature if you're a godless Liberal, will be $50.00 for the first violation, and then increase all the way up to $1,000 for subsequent infractions. 

Now, I don't know how they're going to determine just who is using their fireplace the way fireplaces ought to be used, but they're certainly going to try.  My guess is they'll create a whole new bureau and hire a bunch of new UNION guys to drive around in shiny new cars we provide for them (probably electric), just looking for smoke coming out of our chimneys. And then they'll whip out their ticket book and ruin another of your fine-weather days. I'm guessing they'll each be making about $200,000 a year, plus a whole raft of benefits.

BTW, you should know that the Los Angeles Basin is actually a "basin," or chunk of real estate bounded on all sides by mountains.  So, when the on-shore breezes start to blow, any crap in the air stops when it hits the big hills a few miles from the water, and then backs up all the way to the coast.  That's called "smog."  You should know also there is undisputed evidence that smog (a mixture of smoke and fog) was ever-present 500 years before the first SUV arrived here due to hundreds and hundreds of Indian campfires.  Oh, sorry. They're now called "Indigenous Peoples."  The very same "Indigenous Peoples" who own and operate the most lucrative casinos anywhere.  I can tell you this:  The very next time somebody wants me to play cowboys and Indians, I want to be one of them there Indians...errrrr, "Indigenous Peoples."

Think it can't get any dumber than that?  Read on...

Build that wall between California and the "Flyover Country."

Everybody by now knows that Taxifornia is the very heart of Liberal Lunacy.  We have more than two dozen towns that have declared themselves to be "sanctuary cities." That means they simply refuse to call up ICE and hand over criminal illegal aliens who may have been found to be on the wrong side of the law and wound up in their jail cells.  I mean, we're talking criminal illegal aliens!  Not some poor fool who crossed the border illegally to work in the kitchen of a Chinese restaurant in order to send back remittances to momma and the kids back in Cuernavaca.  They're illegal criminal alien crooks!  Murderers!  Rapists!  Burglars!  

So these cities, from San Diego to Lost Angeles to Santa Monica to Santa Cruz to San Francisco have decided which Federal laws to honor and obey, and which to simply ignore. 

But Trump has thrown down the gauntlet and is threatening these sanctuary cities with withholding Federal monies if they don't quickly get on the right side of the law.  And some have seen the light.  But others, such as L.A. and San Fran have doubled down. They have declared themselves to be sanctuaries forever and always.  No questions! But Taxifornia's Legislature has tripled down. It has decided to name itself a "sanctuary state."  That means the entire State will refuse to honor ICE detainers.  In essence, it is giving the finger to the Federal Government and daring it to do something about it. And to show just how serious it is on this matter, it has hired Eric Holder, ex-U.S. Attorney General, to help it fend off Trump if he decides to come after it for its lawlessness.

Remember Holder?  He's the only Cabinet-level officer to have ever been held in contempt of Congress in the entire history of America.  That's because he refused to turn over subpoenaed documents to Congress relating to "Fast and Furious," the illegal and unconstitutional gun-running scheme entered into by the Obama Administration. Remember that one?  Obama/Holder bought thousands of assault weapons with our Stimulus money and proceeded to hire pimply-faced twenty somethings to "slow walk" them across the southern border and into the hands of drug cartels.  The thinking was, we're told, that one or more would be discovered at a crime scene and Obama/Holder could point to it as proof-positive that U.S.-made guns were fueling the Mexican drug crisis.

But a border guard, Brian Terry, was shot dead by one of these guns before the nefarious scheme could unfold.  And it was summarily scrapped and Obama/Holder went into spin-mode in an effort to explain it away.  They couldn't.  And haven't.  

So this same Holder guy is now working for me and all other California taxpayers at the rate of $25,000 a month, to protect us against Trump and the rest of America, while we are breaking the law at flank speed.  The politicians who made the decision to take this tack held up their hands and swore to defend and honor the laws of the United States. Does this sound like their honoring that oath?  Me neither...

Cross your legs, Bossie, cross your legs...

The otherwise-unemployables in Sacramento who get together and pass laws just to have something to do have now outdone themselves.  Ready? They have just decided that a major source of pollution here in La La Land is...ta da!...cow farts!  Yes, my friends, and you are my friends, the methane that leaks out of the back end of cattle is a major source of air pollution.  The experts are saying that 15% of all California pollution comes from the south end of old Bossie. It is estimated that one single cow can produce 130 gallons of methane PER DAY!  

So, they passed a law and Governor Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown signed it into law on September 16th, that dictates that dairy farms must reduce methane emissions to 40% of the 2013 level by 2020.  That's part of the State's new push to reduce our overall greenhouse gas emissions to 80% of 1990 levels by 2050.  Confused yet?  Me too.  

And what about non-dairy cattle?  What about those that get turned into steaks?  Don't they need regulated?  I'm thinking they should stop farting also.  But no, they're not targeted. I'm guessing somebody has something against dairies, which are leaving the state at flank speed.  Of course, once they're gone, we'll be importing our milk and cheese from Nevada or Utah or Arizona, which all have adult supervision and choose not to pass dumbass laws like this one.  And the price we pay for this tomfoolery will go up exponentially, due to the fact that our milk will then be imported from these other states via semi-trailers, which will produce emissions and thus foul the air, and cost two or three times what we're now paying. Which will, of course, negatively impact poor families most of all.

And what happens if cows don't stop farting enough to make the politicians happy? Their owners get fined, just like those who try and stay warm in front of their fireplaces! I don't know about you, but I'm thinking maybe the nice folks who drive around looking for smoke signals coming out of your chimney could somehow be cross-trained to multi-task and include the inspection of bovine buttocks into their bureaucratic repertoire.  I mean, since it's going to cost Californians the $50 Million that Sacramento has budgeted to help get this new money-wasting program kickstarted, we might want to find some way of making it more efficient.

Oh my God!  I'm sorry!  What was I thinking?

Pre-pubescent hookers and their pimps, you're welcome!

Just as I was about to push "publish" and send this little posting off into the ether so that you, my loyal readers, could begin to inculcate the enormous truth that it happily conveys, I was struck by a new and even greater example of dumbassitude!  Ready?

The Democrat-controlled Legislature up there in Sacrascrewyou just passed a brand-new law that makes selling your body quite alright for 12 year-old's.  No, I'm not making this up.  And, if you're a 12 year-old's pimp, you're off Scot-free as well.  It seems they believe that to make a criminal out of a grade-schooler would be bad, so they decriminalized sex with minors and those who help sell them. 

But wait!  What if you're an 18 year-old and you engage in consensual sex with a 16 year-old?  Too bad, pimple face! You're guilty of statutory rape and need to visit the Gray Bar Hotel for an extended visit.  Soooo, consensual sex with a minor gets you hard time, but selling a Girl Scout's body gets both you and the girl an official reprieve.  

Anybody else besides me think this whole mess is a...mess?

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Health Insurance "101"


Before we go any farther into the meat of this little posting, let me start with three hard-and-fast, solid-as-a-rock, true-blue, immutable, all-day, every-day factoids that you'll need to inculcate in order to fully comprehend and appreciate the wisdom it contains. Ready?  Here goes...

1 ...When you purchase insurance of any kind, you are betting the insurance company you purchase coverage from that what you are insuring yourself against WILL happen, and they're betting you that it WON'T!

2 ...Insurance companies employ what are known as "actuaries."  They are the math whiz, green eye shade, stuck away in the basement in a little room, unable to get a date on Friday night-types, to determine the level of risk an insurance company takes on when it chooses to offer a certain kind of policy.  Whether car, or boat, or plane, or health, or life, or, or, the degree of risk must be determined before a price or fee can be established at which it is to be sold. Or, in proper parlance, what "premium" should be charged. Without that up-front knowledge, it would be impossible to determine with certainty whether or not a particular insurance plan would be profitable.  And without a profit, whether the company is a for-profit, or a mutual, non-profit company that must produce "excess revenues" in order to sustain itself, the company goes down like a rock, leaving its policy holders in the lurch.  

3 ...Soooooooooo, to tidy it all up, all forms of available data are gathered to make that determination.  And then "actuarial tables," as they are known, are created to advise the Big Shots in the silk suits on the 13th floor of the green glass headquarters building how to price out the policies. In other words, they need to know from those actuarial tables how many out of an "insurance pool" of, say, 100,000 people, will have their cars stolen, or their condos catch fire, or acquire cancer, or heart disease, or Alzheimers, and thus how to charge the other, presumably healthy insureds in the latter example in order to cover the losses from the sick insureds. 

Buuuuuuuut, if required to issue policies to those who already have cancer, or heart disease or Alzheimers, as Obamacare mandated, you should now be able to see that those who have it would be able to buy coverage for less, and the remaining, say 999,600 out of our theoretical population of 100k would have to pay more to subsidize the others. Get it?  I hoped that you would.

So, now on with our little essay.

You've no doubt been hearing a lot lately about the new Administration's plan to repeal and replace Obamacare.  

Actually, as you may know, the Republicans have been trying to put a figurative bullet in the head of this gargantuan boondoggle of a health care plan since it was rammed through Congress in the dark of night back in 2009 without a single Republican vote.

And since it has proven to do everything it wasn't supposed to do, including raising costs, raising rates, raising deductibles, and raising hell with what used to be the very finest health care system on the planet, it's about time it should be put out of its (our) misery. 

In short, Obamacare (the derisive term for the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2009") is a health insurance plan.  But it is not a health care plan.  That's because it costs so much and the deductible is so high and so few physicians actually take it in payment for the services they're expected to render.  In other words, it's a policy you simply must buy, because your Gummint says so and will fine you Big Time is you don't, but one physicians do not have to accept.  And, being one of the very few to have actually read this enormous mess, yes, I did, I don't blame them a bit.  

For purposes of background, consider these little Obamacare factoids:

  -  O'care was voted into effect by 51 Senators at 11:30 p.m. on Christmas eve of 2009 using a parliamentary trick unused since the formation of our Country.  The actual bill, all 2,700 pages of it, didn't arrive on the Congressweenies' doorsteps until 8:30 a.m. the next morning.  It was then voted on in the House of Representatives by the then Democrat majority at 9:30 a.m. that same morning. Sooooo... 

...not a single Congressman, or woman, or these days, "other," actually read it before voting on it!  

But, as Representative Nancy Pelosi, then Majority Leader, of the House, and author of big chunks of it said, 

"you have to pass it before you can know what's in it, away from the fog of the controversy." 

Ummm, what?

  -  O'care is not a single health care bill.  It is a series of little two or three-page Liberal wet dreams that were all stapled together into this Brontosaurean load of crap once the Democrats realized that they had taken full and complete control of the House, the Senate and the Presidency.  In short, they had all the power they needed to do anything they wanted, in any way they wanted, at any time they wanted. And what they did with all that power is tantamount to giving a heroin junkie an AMEX Saphire card and turning him loose on the seedier side of town with a high-priced hooker as his tour guide.

  -  O'care is a one-size-fits-all plan.  That means if you're a man you get mammograms and birth control pills, no choice. And if you're a woman you get prostate exams, no choice. Why?  Because Democrats are all for inclusiveness and sameness.  Sort of an updated "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" type of thinking.  Yeah, I know, that's stupid, but, then again, so are they.

  -  O'care presumes to force insurance companies who choose to participate to cover young adults on their parents' policies until the age of 26 (as an aside, maybe it's because in this economy they probably can't find a job!), and also cover pre-existing medical conditions.  Think about that. That's sort of like buying a six year-old Cadillac, and then going straight out and wrapping it around a tree.  And then, trying to buy comprehensive insurance against wrecking your now destroyed Cadillac, at the same exact rates you would have expected to pay had you not put a big old owwwie on that Cadillac, and also expecting your insurance company to replace your now wrecked Caddy with a brand-new one. Hey all you Liberals! That makes so sense to anyone except to you!

  -  O'care establishes 153 new boards and commissions, to be populated by thousands of highly-paid bureaucrats, all appointed by some other highly-paid bureaucrats, but none of them - none of them - need be physicians!  And, by the way, one of those boards is the "Independent Payment Advisory Board."  That would be the one Sarah Palin called the "Death Panel."  That would be the one that decides which ailments get covered, and for whom, and at what payment to those who deliver the treatment.  No discussion, no negotiation, no compromise.  Example:  If you are 59 and one-half, and come down with kidney failure, you get dialysis and a chance to live.  If you are 59 and one-half, and just one-day, and get kidney failure, you die.  Sounds pretty "death panel-ish" to me.  How about you?

 -  And, for the very first time in the history of our Great Country, O'care presumes to require us, demand of us, force us against our will, to purchase something, anything, and presume also to levy a very big fine against us if we don't. 

Yes, my friends, and you are my friends, by virtue of a Supreme Court decision, however poorly reached (thanks Chief Justice John Roberts for turning into a Democrat when we most needed you to be a Republican!), your pocket book is directly within the reach of the Gummint and the IRS if they want you to buy something.  Don't cogitate on that too long. It will make you sick to your tummy. 

There's much more that this bunch of crap does, but what it doesn't do is keep the promise of the guy who sold it to us. Remember?  

"If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.  If you like your health insurance, you can keep your health insurance." 

Both lies.  Bald-faced lies, repeated dozens of times, over a period of months and months, by none other than B. Hussein Obama, ex-President and now full-time golfer.

Yes, I know.  That not only sucks, it makes no sense.  The Powers-That-Be have decided what you need, and they're going to make you buy it for your own good.  As I've said so many times before, somewhat snarkily, "The elite Liberals just want to be left alone to live our lives."

So, before we summarize the length, breadth and depth of this problem, let's summarize what we've learned.  Ready?

"Obamacare took health insurance from those who had it so it could give health insurance to the 30 million who didn't. And then it offered those from whom it had forcibly extracted their health insurance the opportunity to buy back a pale imitation of what they used to have, but not nearly as good, for two or three times what they had been paying in premiums, plus deductibles of three or four times as much. And those who wound up receiving health insurance, some 20 million, they say, got help from the Taxpayers, that would be you and me, to pay their monthly premiums.  And how many now still have no health insurance?  Approximately 30 million.  I kid you not...

So here's the Bottom Line, as they say.  The Republicans now find themselves in the same position as their Democrat counterparts were back when they shanked the Taxpayer in an effort to gather up more voters from the Less Than Successful Class. They now have the Big Lebowski...the House, the Senate and the Presidency.  And they're all about trying to put Humpty back into his egg shell.  They're trying ultra-hard to make some sort of sense out of unwinding Obamacare and replacing it with something sort of like what if was intended to do in the first place: offer health insurance to the less well-heeled by increasing competition between insurance companies, offering choice to the purchaser and reducing regulatory quagmires. 

I expect you'll see insurance companies marketing policies across state lines, just like they do car insurance.  I expect you'll see a simpler, more bare-bones form of "catastrophic" coverage, designed for the younger, healthier policy holder. I expect you'll see some sort of health savings accounts, which we'll be able to use to pay our own health care costs with before-tax dollars.  I expect you'll see "portability" in health insurance whereby each of us owns our policies and can take them with us from job-to-job throughout our lives. And I expect you'll see dramatically reduced rules and regulations from the Feds to de-complicate the oversight process.  All these changes should increase competition, lower premiums dramatically and enable the sorts of changes necessary to make "universal healthcare" finally work.

Epilogue:  To those who think I may have puked forth some less than salient factoids with this little posting, here's some info to serve as a foundation for my opinions:  I am a graduate economist, an inveterate entrepreneur with more than 40 years in the health care bizz, experience as a licensed insurance agent for many years, and I'm probably alone in having read all of Obamacare.  If you can match any part or all of my bona fides, write back and let me know where you think I've gone off the rails. Otherwise, wise up and embrace the fact that Democrats are straight-up nuts for causing all this upheaval to our economy and our health care system, and agree that each and every one of them should be voted out of office at the earliest occasion and never welcomed back...