Deconstructing Diarrhea

I love arguments.  Give me some tenets and some ground to fight and I’ll go to town.   But I was recently handed an argument built on diarrhea, as a lot of Democrats have lately, and now I have no idea what to do.  Here’s how it happens (follow along with the original article here)

First, take a news story that everyone has heard of and use it as a solid lead in to your argument. 

When McDonald's told federal regulators in a recent memo that it would be "economically prohibitive" for its insurance carrier to continue to cover its 30,000 hourly workers unless it received a waiver from the ObamaCare requirement that 80% of premiums for such minimed plans be spent on medical care, alarm bells went off in the White House.

Ok, seems like it’s going somewhere.  The ObamaCare reference is starting to smell a bit though, a little like Mallory after lunch. 

Inject Nancy Pelosi.  This is important because you need a villain.  Someone everyone can hate.  At this point forget policy, or what’s better for the country, or anything of any substance.

Suddenly the "affordable health care for Americans" that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke of when she passed a bill no one had read was revealed to be an unaffordable fraud that threatened to throw untold numbers of young workers into the ranks of the uninsured in an already precarious election year.

I like verbs we’re using so far.  Alarms in the White House.  Revealed.  Like it’s kindred pooh, this article stirs up emotion immediately.  And then inject a hint of socialism.  Like eating six tacos the night before, this is the stuff that can really clear out a church.

Remember the days of sharing the burden and spreading the wealth? These 30 waivers exempt coverage for around a million workers, teachers, farmers and young people who can now go to the polls with a little less angst.

Wait, wait, before we get to the crescendo, I need to try and argue something here so let me get into the meat (no pun intended … really).  If I read this correctly, and it’s hard to read pooh literally, the main argument is that the waiver helps teachers, farmers, and young people and so they want to vote for the people who are helping them.   I’m confused.  Why is this bad?

By the time we get to the end, like the taco induced mess, pooh covered words are just flowing out. Unconstitutional.  Lied to.  Fraud.  And so the reader is left no other conclusion.  Clearly the crap is beautiful and great and telling me something that I need to know.  WTF?

Me?  As someone who loves an argument, I have absolutely no idea what to argue here.  I’m staring at a big pile of festering shit and wondering, why is everyone so mesmerized.

I’ve been hard on the administration lately.  But in truth, the author of this article knows that health care exchanges aren’t scheduled until 2014 to give insurers time to build them.  And without exchanges, there’s no competition or availability for low-cost insurance plans.  And mandates are needed to collect premiums from healthy young people.  Otherwise, you can’t support insurance plans that cover everyone.  And that include preventative medicine, so that we don’t wait to treat someone until they have a Diabetes-induced heart attack because they couldn’t afford a doctor’s visit. 

What’s hard to believe is that people really rally behind this.  Forget that the new insurance plans will be better for McDonald’s workers or that to get to this better environment, the DHHS is doing what the bill said to do to prevent current insurance plans from dropping.  No, it’s so much more in these days to criticize change.  (And it’s so refreshing to hear it from investors.com, who is, after all, for the little guy)

Well, go ahead everyone and clap for your pile of pooh.  Leading up to the election, we seem to be doing a lot of this lately.  I’ll be in the bathroom celebrating the invention of the toilet.