Should-Read: Wall Street Journal editorial writer Joe Rago found dead in his apartment. I am very sorry for him and his family.
Note, first, that none of his predictions about the effects of ObamaCare have so far shown any signs of coming true. None. But a lot of people have gotten addiction treatment through ObamaCare. Note, second, that when a healthy 34-year-old is found dead when, after missing one day of work, his boss sends the police to his apartment, you gotta think: fentanyl and heroin. And so I am even sorrier for him and his family:
Joe Rago (2010): The ObamaCare Crossroads: "Once the health-care markets are put through Mr. Obama's de facto nationalization, costs will further explode... https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704207504575130321235660474
...Soon the public will reach its taxing limit, and then something will have to give on the care side. In short, medicine will be rationed by politics, no doubt with the same subtlety and wisdom as Congress's final madcap dash toward 216 votes.... Government will set the cost-minded priorities and determine what kinds of treatment options patients are allowed to receive. Medicare's price controls will be exported to the remnants of the private sector... leading to shortages and delays of months or years... especially the case for the elderly and grievously ill, and for innovation in procedures, technologies and pharmaceuticals. Eventually, quality and choice—the best attributes of American medicine in spite of its dysfunctions—will severely decline....
A vote for ObamaCare is also a vote against the vitality of American capitalism. Business elites have mostly held their tongues, or calculated that they can later dump their health-care liabilities on the government.... A self-governing democracy can of course decide that it wants to become this kind of super-welfare state. But if the year-long debate over ObamaCare has proven anything, it is that Americans want no such thing.... An entitlement the country can't afford and doesn't want may pass because of sheer ideological willfulness. The ugliness of the bill, and of its passage, means that some or all of it might be repealable, but far better not to make the tragic mistake in the first place.
Whatever bilge the Wall Street Journal may say, addiction is not well thought of as the result of personal moral failings reinforced either by the genetic weakness of lacking willpower or being brought up in the culture of poverty...
