Live free or there
Your communism’s showing.
In a free country, you decide what you can afford. But in Massachusetts, it’s a different story:
Nearly 100,000 Massachusetts taxpayers have been fined for failing to obtain health insurance, even as a major survey concludes the effort to create near-universal coverage in the state is meeting key goals.
Five percent of taxpayers failed to obtain health coverage last year, and more than half of those — about 97,000 — were forced to forfeit their personal exemption — worth $219 — after it was determined they could have afforded health care.
The state will force you get health insurance if you can afford it. Then the state will decide if you can afford it or not. And if you can and did not, you will be fined. See, they just up and passed a law mandating health insurance coverage:
The state’s first-in-the-nation universal health insurance law required everyone in the state to be insured by July 2007, except for those who secured a waiver proving they couldn’t afford insurance.
Wow.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:45 am
As a (pro-RKBA) socialist, I must object that that’s not communism, that’s just bureaucratic stupidity.
Communists would institute taxing the wealthiest segments of society and giving *everybody* universal coverage. Not the same thing as the monstrosity described above.
June 3rd, 2008 at 9:52 am
Communalism? Collectivism?
I’m all out of -isms.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:33 am
Socialism is just blue collared communism. They all suck and none of them have ever worked anywhere.
June 3rd, 2008 at 10:51 am
I love how they describe the plan as a success because they got a lot of people to sign up for the subsidized healthcare (read: non taxpayers), and they forced the rest of the population to play along, or else.
Kinda like giving away a cooler full of free beer in the parking lot outside a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert, and then bragging about how “successful” your beer giveaway was, as if you thought you might have trouble unloading it all.
June 3rd, 2008 at 11:13 am
Tell me again how it is that Mitt Romney, who signed that piece of crap into law, is considered more conservative than John McCain?
June 3rd, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Oh great, now Schwarzenegger is going to have to do something even stupider…
June 3rd, 2008 at 1:29 pm
I’m one of the MA chumps fined for not having healthcare. I’m angry at Mitt Romney for instituting this program, and I’m even angrier at Deval Patrick for not ending it.
June 3rd, 2008 at 2:44 pm
It really sucks to think that a state who produced Americans like John and Samuel Adams could turn into a bunch of freedom hating nanny-staters wanting the government to take care of every aspect of their lives.
“Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can. ” – Samuel Adams.
June 3rd, 2008 at 2:55 pm
First, get the government involved in medicine, driving up the costs exponentially.
Next, when people can no longer afford it, require care givers to treat people anyway.
When that turns into a disaster, require people to get insurance for things like a case of the sniffles, or a cut that requires stitches– things that people used to just pay for directly.
When that turns out badly, start fining people for not getting insurance.
In short, create problems, then blame freedom, and enact more restrictions that will lead to more problems, ad infinitum. This has also been working brilliantly in the energy business for decades.
By all means, never, ever even talk about a free market in health care, ’cause that would be just…crazy!
June 3rd, 2008 at 3:54 pm
And people get anxious and fretful when i say i want to throw the Revolution Switch? You understand the idiots we’d go after would more than likely not even shoot back? They’re so sure of their superiority that they think they’d get out of it.
And stuff like the above is only going to get worse. Where’s the line in the sand?
June 4th, 2008 at 2:15 am
ATLien there IS no line in the sand as long as we have our bread and circuses. People will complain and grudgingly go along to get along. Sure there may be some Montana Freemen type things, or Wacos, but we have TV news to tell us who to believe and what to think.
Even if we’ve seen the Problem Reaction Solution crap over and over and over again we don’t learn. As a country we’re a battered wife who thinks of the government as our husband who hits us becomes it loves us, never seeing the constant and escalating abusiveness.
June 4th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
I wouldn’t cross the Massachusetts state line to pick up a hundred dollar bill lying three feet across it.