Xeni passionately credits the ACA in helping her survive cancer

No.

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Not sure I’m seeing your point, unless you are advocating a wealthy friend based model of health care.

Which would be a shit point and a shit model of health care.

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I watched it last evening.

Brava!

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We would have invented it?

Good news everyone!

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I imagine this is supposed to be a leading question. What implied conclusion are we supposed to draw?

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Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

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soon enough, soon enough comrade

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Click on that photo link.

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I see. So your intention was to add extenuating conditions to your leading question so as to imply a conclusion not borne out by reality.

How many other spurious conditions would you care to throw into the mix?

If Xeni was a billionaire. If Xeni was immune to cancer. If the sky opened up and angels came down from heaven and shat chocolate drops that cured all humanities ails… etc.

If you weren’t searching for a way to undermine the importance Xeni placed on the ACA, you might be able to ask a cogent question.

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Again:

Hint:
IF is not a fifth, and the average person doesn’t have any “wealthy friends.”

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I’ve been trying to remember the normal rejoinder…

If horses had elbows then we’d all be up to our necks in shit… no

If wishes were kisses then you’d be smooched to death…

I just can’t remember the actual words, only the form.

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###“If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride?”

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Thanks.

I googled for a while but came up short.


lol, hey! I actually had horses and wishes! Soo close!

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Mulder: If Lucas Menand never gets hit by that bus, his complaint gets heard before the grand committee, Jason Nichols loses his funding and he never gets to collaborate on his research with Dr. Yonechi. Therefore, this photograph never gets taken because this celebration never happens.

Scully: …And if your sister is your aunt and your mother marries your uncle, you’d be your own grandpa!

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is one disappointed in BoingBoing?

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who is the hot chick in the video ?

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And if you take cranberries and stew them like applesauce, they taste much more like prunes than rhubarb does.
— Groucho Marx

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In all likelihood? No. Meaning that she would almost certainly be dead.

So, given this sort of leading question, on your part, a counter-question must be asked:

In the absence of the ACA, what course of action, exactly, would you recommend for an ill person that is unable to afford the cost of American Health Care to pursue in order to receive care?

Please note that an answer of “nothing” or “die quickly” is unacceptable, but failure to respond to this will be taken as tacit acceptance of those options.

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Neither should be “go to the ER,” which is the smug brush-off answer I hear from a lot of health care neanderthals. Because FUCK. YOU, they don’t do colonoscopies, radiation treatments, and the like in the fucking ER.

I have been literally lost sleep wondering if I should put off retirement a year or two because I have a sister who has been getting affordable insurance through the ACA and I’m wondering if I and another sibling are going to have to subsidize insurance for her.

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If she weren’t an “appropriate spokesperson” (she is, but I’ll get to that later because it’s not important), then there are tens or hundreds of thousands of others who have cancer and don’t have wealthy friends to bail them out.

Should they have to die because they’re in the wrong social circle?

Xeni is in a very special place: with enough of a voice to speak to the importance of the ACA, while at the same time not being one of the 1% and able to afford to have her cancer treatments delivered to a Beverly Hills mansion by Lamborghini.

Perhaps there is an alternate timeline, one where the ACA doesn’t exist, but she survived her cancer. You cannot prove such a timeline exists, nor can she or I prove that it doesn’t. But we don’t have to. Because this is not, and never was, just about her. If she had survived her cancer despite there being no ACA, someone else would have died of the same thing because of their lack of insurance.

Nothing has to be true for ever. Just for long enough to tell you the truth.

  • Terry Pratchett, The Truth

One person dying of cancer because they cannot afford the treatment is one too many. If the ACA prevents that, it’s worth keeping. Worth making more economical? Surely. But never worth getting rid of.

As for the utterly stupid question you asked about Xeni’s “wealthy friends”:

https://twitter.com/xeni/status/192398149128695809

If her “wealthy friends” were unable to keep her from being “devastated” by the cost of her treatments after the insurance covered their part, you really have no argument to say that she could have afforded the treatment with their help if she wasn’t insured.

Now, you heartless, odious, smug, Objectivist trolley (but I repeat myself), go off and pester some other community. Preferably one far enough away that our Sun burns out before the electromagnetic radiation cast off by the copy of Atlas Shrugged that you call a brain can make it back here.

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