Tag: health insurance

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No Kings Day — With luck, it will become a national holiday

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

October 18th ,2025

I was watching a clearly rattled Trump tell a Faux News reporter, “No, really, I’m not a king. Not a king.” He somehow failed to be very convincing.

The “No Kings” protest is under way, with possibly ten million people turning up in at least 2,600 locations to protest the Trump regime. There are another 100 locations in Canada and across Europe. The people are rising, and the Trump regime is fearing them.

There’s a saying in America: “The government should fear the people. The people should never fear the government.” Millions of people across the country have remembered that lesson.

The final pre-demonstration note of the regime’s efforts to frighten, anger, gaslight and lie to us came yesterday when Trump commuted the sentence of the repulsive and disgusting George Santos, who emerged blinking into the sunlight this morning. Trump wanted liberals to erupt in fury, but he’s been to that well so many times that liberals didn’t take the bait. We already knew that Trump was a vicious, amoral, senile piece of shit, and nobody excepts him to be any better than he ought to have been.

He wanted anger and loss of control from the demonstrators. What he got was weary disgust, loathing, and contempt.

For the rest of the GOP, things are just as bad. The leaked emails from the Young Republicans, thousands of lies, smears, hate and self-pity, merely cemented the public perception that the GOP had not only lost its way, but was completely in thrall to the worst humanity has to offer. These aren’t young Ayn Rand idealists: these are the sorts of people who shot Jews in the back of the head and kicked their still twitching bodies into corpse-filled ditches. JD Vance did himself no favors with his avuncular chuckle and a “boys will be boys” defense; it just shows what an utterly empty and amoral vacuum this slick little opportunist really is.

ICE may have begun its campaign of terror aimed at undocumented workers, but as it became more and more obvious that the effort to frighten and cow was aimed at everyone in America, the campaign has backfired. People saw the images of politicians and judges being arrested and roughed up, innocent bystanders trussed and thrown to the ground like sacks of potatoes, and naked, bound children being herded into Uhauls to be taken who-knows-where, and recoiled in disgust. These pitiful, masked, vicious little Nazi cowards, some of them the desecrators of Congress on January 6th, were the antithesis of everything America stood for.

There’s a brilliant meme circulating on the web that anyone who believes the ICE propaganda should read.

It goes, “ If you’re using undocumented people’s tax records to find them and kidnap them, then it was never about them not paying taxes.

If you’re showing up at their place of employment, then it was never about them not working.

If you’re showing up at courthouses, it was never about getting them to do it the right way. If you’re kidnapping women and children, it was never about criminals.

If you’re not giving them due process, it was never about the Constitution. And if you’re spending billions of dollars to do it, it was never about the economy.

And if you’re doing all of this in the name of a 34-time convicted felon, then it was never about following the law.”

History has tales of such police state bullies, be it Hitler’s Schutzstaffel or Stalin’s People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (better known as the NKVD), or East Germany’s Ministry for State Security (aka Stasi). All eventually fell, and the members spent the rest of their lives hiding their gruesome past, living in constant fear of exposure, knowing friends and neighbors would spit on them, and children disown them, should details of their past emerge.

That is what the future holds for the strutting cowardly bullies in ICE. They will suffer for what they are doing now.

Decent people are repulsed by the scapegoating and cruelty of the Trump regime against immigrants, gays, and trans. Knowledgeable people know this is just the start, and they will come for the rest of us.

The Lord Ha-Has of the right wing media, oblivious to what eventually became of Lord Ha-Ha, continue to pump the party line that the “No Kings” rallies are “Hate America” riots, and that the demonstrators are all paid to be there, and that protest has become an industry. Let’s see: ten million demonstrators at $500 a head would be five billion dollars. About the only people who could afford that would be the over-entitled dirtbags who inflicted Trump upon us in the first place. Doesn’t seem likely, does it? Let’s face it: they aren’t about to return anything to the people who made their obscene wealth possible in the first place.

The shutdown was supposed to be the GOP’s final consolidation of power. The idea was they could use the shutdown to avoid any accountability to Congress, blame Democrats for the shut down, and use it as an excuse to further dismantle the United States. At the very least, it would be enough to keep their own followers in line, and they saw no need to give a fuck what any non-Republican thought.

But that’s disintegrating as the shutdown approaches its third week. They tried claiming that Democrats simply preferred to “waste a trillion dollars in tax money.” And of course the usual dim-wits tried claiming that if the government shut down, nobody would miss it.

Of course, tens of millions of people are already missing the thousands of services and programs, big and small, that have been halted by the shutdown.

And an unlikely ally has shown up: Health insurance providers. In thirteen states this week, they projected the increases in premiums people would face if the effort to dismantle Obamacare hidden in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” wasn’t rescinded—the main point the Democrats are fighting the budget update on. For the luckiest people, the new rates are horrifying. For most, they will be devastating, and may, for thousands, be a death sentence.

According to Health System Tracker, “Enhanced premium tax credits that make coverage more affordable will expire at the end of 2025, driving up out-of-pocket premium payments by over 75% on average. This is expected to cause healthier enrollees to drop their coverage and create a sicker risk pool.”

In some cases, out-of-pocket premium costs could quadruple. For some people, this seems a poor trade-off for richer, happier billionaires. The people who made who made Trump, the senile pederast, possible.

Family matters meant I had to stay home this morning. But it didn’t stop me from making my own voice heard through this piece, and to show my solidarity with the protesters.

As they say in Portland, “Ribbit!”

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The Thompson Shooting — He wasn’t the real target

Bryan Zepp Jamieson

December 8th 2024

There was something different about the Brian Thompson shooting. Assassinations (and this almost certainly was an assassination rather than a typical random murder) are not usually an accepted part of American life, even when the victims were wildly polarizing figures such as Huey Long, George Wallace, Ronald Reagan or Robert Kennedy. (The two exceptions were Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy, whose deaths were widely cheered in the South.)

There have been the deaths of foreign leaders that met with widespread approval from the American public: Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin come to mind.

Fame or infamy played a major role in such incidents, of course. But with Brian Thompson, fame wasn’t a factor. Perhaps 1 in 20 Americans had even heard of the man before he got shot. Take the top 100 corporations in America, and the average person might be able to name five of the CEOs on that list.

The corporation he ran, United Health Care, was the most notorious of the so-called “health care providers” (they provide exactly no health care, but are simply a bridge troll between people and a human right), one with the highest denial of coverage rate in the country (32%, nearly a third of all cases they supposedly covered) and we knew it was widely hated, not just by its victims, but by friends, relatives and co-workers of those millions who suffered.

UnitedHealth Group, an umbrella corporation that includes United Health Care, made $22 billion in profits in 2023. Revenues were $371.6 billion. United Health Care was roughly a quarter of that gaudy total. Remember, “profits” don’t include salaries (Thompson alone got over $10 million a year plus perks) or money spent fighting claims for denial of coverage and overcharging.

Nobody makes $22 billion “serving the public.” The only way to make that kind of money is by robbing the public blind. In a vital and necessary public need like health care, a certain amount of viciousness is required. Denying claims supposedly reduces costs, but I can’t help but wonder how much was spent on lawyers and lawgivers in order to fight resistance to those often-frivolous denials of necessary care. What is the ratio between pennies saved and costs of screwing the clients?

Remember, in most countries, access to health care is considered a human right! Canadians complain about the cost and inefficiency of their system, but the per capita cost is about 62% of what Americans pay, and not only is it 100% coverage for everyone, but includes dental and vision and some mental health care.

Actual medical providers—you know, doctors, nurses, clinics, hospitals, rather than bridge trolls—report that up to 40% of their expenses related to patient care come from filling out the endless and endlessly varying insurance forms and requirements, nearly all unique to each of the hundreds of bridge trolls, big and small, that stand between patients and care with their hands out.

“Profits” also doesn’t include the billions spent on lobbying against any sort of universal health care program, and paying to ensure that the legislatures are stuffed with well-paid toadies and cryptofascists dedicated to a land by the corporations, for the corporations, and of the corporations. The billions spent on advertising, lying to the people about how they only exist to help, are also deductible.

Lying and cheating are standard business costs, you know. Thank lobbyists and Citizens United for that.

Even with the improvements we saw under Obama and Biden, health care access in America is the worst in the developed world. Trump is vowing to eliminate Obamacare and Medicaid and Medicare, and if he pulls any of that off, health care in America will plummet below that in basket-case countries such as Somalia or Haiti.

I can’t help but wonder how many voters voted for Trump, aware he wanted to get rid of the ACA and the government providers, but thought to themselves “It will save money and my health insurance will protect me.” Ho, boy, are they in for a surprise.

It’s bad, and it’s going to get much worse, and most people are uneasily aware of that.

Which brings us back to Thompson. Now, for all I know, he was a fine family man, a good neighbor, and supported the local little league team and donated to the Salvation Army. Nearly all people have at least some redeeming features, after all. But he was solidly behind the most loathsome policies in an industry widely despised for such policies. He didn’t inherit UHC’s appalling numbers—he created them, indeed, was on his way to a meeting to boast about them to inspire more of the same when he got shot.

The media reacted with shock and outrage, and we heard the usual mewlings about the streets flooded with guns and random nuts and lack of Christianity that are always heard when someone gets shot in a newsworthy fashion (less than 1% of all shootings, granted). But that died away quickly when the response on social media made itself evident.

The vast majority of reactions ranged between satisfaction to outright glee. UHC posted the usual “shock and sorrow” notice on Facebook, and within 24 hours had 55,000 “laughing” emojis—some 98% of the total responses. Hundreds of thousands of “denied coverage” jokes flew around the blogosphere. The national consensus amounted to “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” There have been celebrity deaths that drew elements of derision and pleasure—Michael Jackson, Andrew Breitbart, Antonin Scalia—but they were famous in their own right. Brian Thompson was a relatively unknown personage. His death was cheered, not because of his individual presence, but because he represented what is arguably the most hated business sector in America. And that hatred is overwhelmingly widespread.

Should Donald Trump’s years of bad living catch up to him and they drag him away, face down, off the Fourth Green, millions will be dancing in the streets. Thompson’s family should know he wasn’t hated for the person he was like Trump is.

But this Thompson shooting incident feels much less like another sad tale in gun-ridden American than it does what those in power most fear—it felt like a SPARK.

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Berth Control

It isn’t just contraception; it’s a power struggle

March 10th 2012

One of the more remarkable manifestations of the current campaign is the sudden foofooraw over contraception. That Santorum would make an issue of it is no big surprise; he’s been considered the religious nut all along. That the rest of the party would jump on the bandwagon as part of a larger casting of conducting “a war on women” is nothing short of amazing.

They have to be pretty confident that between the pressure to prevent poor people from voting, and the insane corporate corruption brought about by Citizens United, they are going to steal this election no matter what they say or do, because they sure aren’t bothering to appeal to voters.

Still, better to assume that the battle isn’t lost, and these fascistic maniacs haven’t already seized control of the country.

Continue reading “Berth Control”

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