The Con Job Hidden Within The Words

Words are powerful and important. They are likely our most important TOOL. Yet they also need to be approached as a TOOL and dealt with rationally and with reason. There seems to have been a concerted effort to make people less able to see past words. Actions can be concealed behind words and they seem not to matter as long as the words that are floating out in front of the action are convincing.

To see what I am talking about you need only look at the bills that are being passed in the United States. This is still relevant because citizens of other countries will defend those actions based upon the flowery words and rhetoric that accompany such a bill. The actual actions, consequences, and ramifications of the bill seem not to matter. All that matters to the masses seems to be the flowery words.

Did they pick a good title that pulls on the heart strings of people?

Do they have the corporate media lined up and ready to propagandize the agenda?

Do they have flowery words they can use to belittle and silence anyone who makes challenge?

I look around me and I see our society is being flooded with these things. I see society often responding to conditioned phrases. It is clear the results of the studies of people like Pavlov have been put to use in society. Did you think when Pavlov and other psychological studies found out the impacts on the animal test subjects that it would not be applied to humans as well? In a dog that could be conditioned to salivate just by ringing a bell.

Words have power. We can discern between them. We call it vocabulary. Collections of words repeated often enough can be used to condition people.

Let me give you an example... I'm going to say a few words. Pay attention to your instinctual reaction to these words.

Conspiracy Theorist

Piracy

Terrorist

Poverty

Lower Class

Middle Class

Rich

Hacker

Patriot

Muslim

Christian

Black

White

Republican

Democrat

Trump

Clinton

Communist

Socialist

Capitalist

Satanist

Blasphemer

Hopefully if some of those words did not have the conditioned reflex of tuning you out and shutting you down you get my point. That is the main purpose of this article and to think about how WORDS have been effectively turned against us. They are still just words. If you become aware then you can put them in their proper place and go back to treating them as words and analyze situations on a case by case basis rather than reacting with conditioned responses.

Now I want to share a few bill names with you:

The Patriot Act

Patient Protection and Affordable Healthcare Act (aka Affordable Healthcare Act, aka Obamacare)

Some people were seeing these bill names as being a problem. You can find a number of articles from a decade more ago when people were observing it happening. Lawmakers turn to catchy names for bills. Yet that did not stop it continued.

Now today I was reading an article by @whatsup titled When you do not understand personal responsibility and the other guy wins. It was not the entirety of the article that inspired this but more some of the comments and discussing Obamacare.

PRIOR TO OBAMACARE:
You could not get insurance for conditions that pre-existed
You could go to an emergency room and get some treatments without insurance, but they were not happy about it.
I paid for a family of six $250/mo for insurance that had no deductible, and covered 100% after copays. My employer paid the other half. The hospitalization copay was $100. That was the best plan I ever had. There were other plans I had over the years that were not quite as good, but they were not bad. There were also years I could not afford any insurance yet my family and I still went to the doctor, and still went to the hospital, and we were not put into debt for it. As far as special treatments I had to get a study that ends up was NOT DONE CORRECTLY on some severe stomach pains I'd been having and they sent me to a specialist. It was considered non-emergent. He agreed to the service as long as I paid $600 up front. I paid. It turns out he did a crappy job and diagnosed me with Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) when in reality it was my gal bladder the entire time.

Then I moved and ended up with that job that had really good insurance. One day I had my wife take me to the hospital from the pain. They did some simple tests like a sonogram and saw tons of big stones and enlargement of my gal bladder. I had it removed with emergency surgery. The surgeon said it was near gangrenous and I would have been dead the next day had I not come in. He said it was one of the largest he'd ever seen and suspects I must have been fighting pain for about thirteen years. The surgery had some issues which took them days to listen to me that something was wrong as I got bigger, and bigger, and eventually puked up bile. Then they listened and realized my cavities had been filling with bile for days. I spent 23 days in the hospital with all kinds of tubes draining me for a surgery that usually leaves a person hospitalized 1 to 2 days. The bill would have come to around $250,000 but other than the hospital co-pay, and prescription co-pays my insurance covered it.

Flash forward... I am at a new job. It pays a lot more and I actually was a Director of IT at a Hospice.

The Affordable Healthcare Act is announced as passed though it is two years from implementation. I just got a chance at my new health insurance. $1500/mo premium for 80/20 + deductible for my family. That was almost half of my paycheck at the time and more than we could afford. We went uninsured. Insurance for me would have been about $600/mo which is still more than we could afford. We could get healthcare insurance, and live in a box on the side of the street, or we could pay our rent/mortgage. That was basically the realistic choice we had.

It turns out the insurance company likes to RAPE pools of people (yes, I hijacked the word RAPE for emotional impact) and that someone in the Hospice had a family member that had a few organ transplants. So they passed that price onto us.

So if you don't want to blame Obamacare then you can point out how Insurance companies are a business and maximizing profits for their shareholders is paramount. It has very little to do with serving society. To maximize profits they will push right to the edge of what is bearable. This is of course subjective.

About this time the concept of HSAs and High Deductible insurance plans were popping up all over the country because while they were still expensive, they were less of a hit to your paycheck.

In the case of some of these you are paying a premium to essentially put money into a special savings account. "Come pay me $60/mo and you can have this account you can put money into to save."

So they are charging me $60/mo to have an account I can't get into unless their is an emergency to protect me from my own irresponsible spending? Afterall things are getting so tight that savings accounts don't really work out. So we pay some guy to be a gatekeeper instead of doing the savings account ourselves. They will often add some other things to make it a bit more attractive to that, yet it still is very SNAKEOIL SALESMAN like.

So who wrote the bulk of the multi-thousand page Affordable Healthcare Act. Insurance companies with the desire to maximize their profits for their shareholders. What better way than to write a bill where they are guaranteed business, have to do very little if anything to compete for it, and are guaranteed subsidies and payments?

This same approach has worked so well at driving down the costs of education. (/sarcasm)

Since Obamacare was passed it has been the most harmful bill to my family and I in my history on the planet. My wife and kids have not been insured since it passed. We pay the yearly fine because it is less than one month of premiums. We pay that fine and we get zero service. My wife did have to go to the hospital once during that time. They treated her, and we are in debt. Yet they work out payments with us and it is less than our premiums would be by a long ways. In addition, if we had insurance we would have had an 80/20 + deductible (likely $10,000) so we would have had to pay $10,000 + 20% of the doctor bill on top of paying the premium and co-pays.

But wait... people that couldn't afford insurance can now!!! Or so they claim. This is actually a con job. I was one of those people prior to Obamacare and was better off then than I am now if I buy one of their plans.

This is not Universal Healthcare. It is touted as Universal Healthcare Insurance which is not the same thing, yet it also is not Universal or my family and I would have something now wouldn't we?

My wife demanded I get insured since all the income in my family comes from me. My current job has an 80/20 + $10,000/year deductible that I pay about $260/mo for just for myself. My company pays a little more than 50% additional on top of that.

So in less than a decade I have gone from $260/mo covering me, my wife, and four kids living with me at the time with $30 doctors office copays, and $100 hospital copay 100%. It was not 80/20. I was making about half the amount of money I am now. To me today having $260/mo premium for 80/20 + $10,000 deductible insurance. It is basically me paying $260/mo in the event of some catastrophe. It is also $260/mo my family could very much use as all other expenses have also risen just nowhere near at the atmospheric rates of insurance.

So when you are in another country and you look at us and compare us to your country's healthcare. Do not assume this is the same thing and the United States finally entering the modern socialist plans. This is nothing like your plan. This is a con-job of the highest order.

Steem On!