To start, let me dare to get personal and share a little too much information. I’m shrinking. I’m getting shorter and shorter. That’s not a fantasy. It’s a fact of nature. It’s why vaguely ageist clichés like “little old man” and “little old lady” have crept into the lexicon.
I used to be 5’9”. A couple of years ago, I measured 5’8” in a physician’s office. Yesterday, in the locker room of a gym where I work out, I tragically decided to check again. I’m now, at age 74, roughly a tenth of an inch shy of 5’7”. No wonder some of my old pairs of slacks are too long for me and my bicycle seems too big for me lately.
This leads to a new Crank’s Law: stuff shrinks over time. Not least among that stuff is the Republican alleged replacement for Obamacare. We’ve been hearing a bit lately about how they’re going to get rid of Obamacare, but give us something bigger and better.
This morning, while making breakfast, the television was on in the next room while Senator Rand Paul blustered his way through an interview on Face The Nation, the CBS Sunday blab show. The conversation turned to Obamacare and I suddenly heard Paul blithering on about what big and wonderful plans the Republicans will put in place of Obamacare when they kill it.
I should have dropped my spatula, run for a pen and pad, and taken notes, but that would have ruined the omelet I was making. Given a choice between a crab and goat cheese omelet and Rand Paul, I’ll go for the omelet any time.
Nevertheless, Paul’s big plans quickly shrank to the old and totally familiar. Paul would let health insurance companies sell their insurance products across state lines. What that would lead to, of course, is the sleaziest insurance companies in the least regulated states selling “gotcha” policies that would in time bring health insurance back to the old impractical mess we’ve had for the last half century prior to Obamacare.
As for the rest? Well, that was being worked on, I think I hard Paul say over my own kitchen clatter.
Typical Republican stuff. Promise big, rile ‘em up, then shrink the details down to just the laws that screw people.
Cross posted at The New York Crank
