Case Studies: Here's The Republican Health Care Plan In Action

How corporate money has demolished the workers compensation system in this country, among other things.

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In a very short span of time, ProPublica has become one of the essential
places to go when you're trying to find out what's really going on in this
country. This week, for example, it produced a report on exactly how the
corporate money power in this country has gone about the de facto dismantling of the system of workers' compensation in the United States, one
or two states at a time. The central figure in the story is a man named Dennis
Whedbee, and his nightmarish ordeal tells us a number of things about where the
country's headed beyond the premise of the piece, which is that worker's comp
soon will be one of those things like unions and a living wage that we will
have to learn to live without, because, of course, we are free.

It was getting late that September afternoon in 2012. Whedbee, a 50-year-old derrickhand, was helping another worker remove a pipe fitting on top of the well when it suddenly blew. Oil and sludge pressurized at more than 700 pounds per square inch tore into Whedbee's body, ripping his left arm off just below the elbow. Coworkers jerry-rigged a tourniquet from a sweatshirt and a ratchet strap to stanch his bleeding and got his wife on the phone. "Babe,'' he said, "tell everyone I love them."

OK, let's stop right there. This is an example of what happens to people when you turn the place they live into a petro-state. Drinking water develops a tendency toward spontaneous combustion. Trains derail and explode. Pipelines leak. And people lose their limbs in horrific industrial accidents. If you turn the place they live into a deregulated petro-state, of course, things get doubly bad.


And let's stop right there. On Thursday, the Supreme Court heard the case of
King v. Burwell, a legalistic fantasy designed to gut the Affordable
Care Act. The people seeking to do so, especially the Republicans in Congress,
and most of the people who probably will seek the party's nomination for the
presidency, don't even have the semblance of an actual plan to replace the ACA
if the Nine Wise Souls rule in favor of the plaintiffs. But one thing they all
agree on is that any plan they have will have as one of its central provisions
the "freedom" of the people to buy their health-insurance "across
state lines." Keep that in mind.

After Whedbee lost his arm, his doctor said he'd be an ideal candidate for a modern prosthesis with a movable hand. But North Dakota's workers' comp insurer sent him to another doctor - not in North Dakota or his home state of Pennsylvania - but in Minnesota. After seeing him once, that doctor recommended a cheaper prosthesis with a metal hook. "I lost a hand," Whedbee pleaded with the insurer to no avail. "I didn't lose a hook."

If the ACA gets demolished come June, and some vague Republican "plan" is developed to take its place, and that "plan" contains the provision about buying insurance across state lines, how long do you think it will take for every health-insurance company to start pricing office space in Bismarck, or Tulsa, or some other place? How long do you think it will take for whatever local regulations still exist in those places to be shredded, and the personnel charged with enforcing them to be overwhelmed? How long do you think it will take for the race to the bottom to begin? Minutes? Seconds? And then we will all experience some fascinating metrics regarding what a human being will go for these days, piecemeal.


Even granting that there's far more to see in Pennsylvania than there is in Alabama, this strikes me as a little grotesque.

Read the whole thing, as the kidz say, and not just for the substance of the story, but for the guideposts within it that show the way toward where the people behind the phony lawsuit argued yesterday want to take the country. This is a tale of the plutocrat's idea of freedom. This is the oligarch's nation, and you can die there, cheaply.

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