Republican reveals their health(don't) care rationale

In this article Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) argued that sick people should have to pay more into the system because they are a financial burden on health people. Healthy people after all lead good lives and should not be punished for those that do not lead such lives. The thing is, many of the sick did not contribute to their own illness, such illnesses having other causes like environmental pollution, heredity or poverty. Implicit in his rationale is that people just don't get sick unless they did something to deserve it, so screw them if they get sick.

As Jonathan Chait put it: "The Republican plan expresses one of the core beliefs shared by movement conservatives, and utterly alien to people across the globe, right and left: that people who can’t afford the cost of their own medical care have nobody to blame but themselves."

And meanwhile the Republicans like Brooks would no doubt fight like hell against a soda tax. There is NO nutritional value to soda and there is direct empirical evidence that it leads to diabetes, obesity and other illness. So taxing people that drink it up front during purchase it one way to do exactly what he wants: to make people pay extra for their bad behavior who then put a strain on the healthcare system when they get those diseases through their own lack of responsibility. They of course still retain their freedom to contaminate their bodies, they just have to also be responsible for their actions.


Btw, Santa Fe is voting today on the soda tax. You should see all the ads against it, claiming it destroys not just our freedom of choice but will cause job loss, unaffordable prices and businesses to close. Just like did when places increase minimum wage. All outright lies, but this is how they operate.