Once Upon a Time, There Was a Garden

There are moments when Libertarians and Neo-liberal small government scolds make sense.  The health care debate is not one of those times.  Paul Ryan went on the Sunday politi-vision shows and framed the GOP effort to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act with the American Health Care Act this way: "People are going to do what they want to do with their lives, because we believe in individual freedom in this country."
Great, wonderful idea, in the best of all possible worlds, where everyone in the country actually acts like responsible grown ups and procures health care coverage without a mandate. Despite the fact that, even with a mandate and penalties, something on the order of 10 million people have chosen not to do so, and many of the people who did gain coverage under the ACA were either added through Medicaid or highly subsidized plans with a cost sharing structure enforced across the board.  Not to mention the fact that many people who actually did purchase plans through the exchanges did so grudgingly.  How do they think this is going to work out? Are they so naive as to think that everyone is going to voluntarily spend money on health insurance because it is the responsible thing to do?
How does it work out if you get hit by an uninsured driver? And no, that is not a false equivalence, large numbers of uninsured people, who could be injured or get sick at any moment are a hazard to the rest of us. And in a very important way, it's even worse than the car insurance situation because while we can revoke the privilege of driving from someone who refuses to carry car insurance, the ethical premise of refusing an uninsured person access to medical care is a bit more serious.
Look, I would like it if we lived in a world where the government didn't need to tell us what we needed to do all the time.  Bureaucracy is annoying, nobody likes the DMV, but I am glad that people need licenses and insurance to drive cars and trucks.
I have spent more than my fair share of time around hospitals and sick people, and I hear about what things cost people.  People, even insured people, get bills that threaten to break them financially.  People rarely think about that when they're healthy and contemplating shelling out thousands of dollars a year for insurance. They should, but they do not.
Despite the fact that we have come a long way from telling stories about gardens, serpents and forbidden fruit, sin continues to be a major problem for humanity.  As long as that is the case, laws and regulations will be necessary; there are some things that people should not be allowed to choose.
If there is more to come to this plan, if they have a goal of making healthcare actually affordable without the need for insurance, I say more power to them.  I somehow doubt that is the case.  There is too much money and too much power involved in the massive complex of insurance companies, hospitals and health care providers to allow actual healthcare reform to take place without imposing some sort of socialized system in place that forcibly shoves out the profiteering that runs the show now.  I don't see that happening on the GOP's watch.
I cannot allow myself the luxury of thinking that Ryan and company are stupid, I think they have to know that the consequences of what they are doing are going to be dire, a growing number of their own gang actually seem to be getting nervous about that reality.
I don't think they ought to trust their President to help them out very much if this goes sideways. For all his bluster, the Donald is not particularly keen on actually doing much other than tweeting about unfair people are being towards him.  He will go along with their plan, maybe, but he's not going to own it or invest in it the way Obama did in the ACA.  The AHCA is probably not going to be called Trumpcare if it gets passed through. Here is what I see in Donald J.Trump: he will support what sells, and he will hedge his liability the same way he did in real estate deals, if this thing collapses he will skate away unscathed, because that's what he does. He won't put his brand on it until it succeeds, on the off chance that it does, he will take credit, but never the blame, it's just who he is.
I guess this seems like kind of a cautionary message to Ryan and the GOP, not that they will be reading my stupid little blog. They need to see the serpent for what it is or else we're all going to pay the price. Life and death are on the line here, human sin never goes away, you are free to hang yourself anytime, and there is no shortage of rope up on Capitol Hill.