Forms of Inquiry: 12/30/14 Today's Inquiries

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And here is why, no matter who is in charge, we are so totally screwed as a nation:

She is a deeply religious Christian, with a tightly knit family that prays together even at fast-food restaurants and has suffered one health crisis after the next. Her mother was run over by a car and spent six months in hospitals and rehabilitation centers. Then her father got cancer and died within months. And this year, Ms. Mayhew’s cherished grandmother died of complications from a stroke. Her grief, she said, has been hard to bear. ...

A nurse practitioner at Family Health Centers had prescribed anti-depressants after Ms. Mayhew had her last baby in 2013 — at the time, she had temporary Medicaid for her pregnancy — but she stopped taking them when the coverage ended. Now she is back on them, and feeling good.

“That’s been a big thing for me,” she said.

And yet.

“I don’t love Obamacare,” she said. “There are things in it that scare me and that I don’t agree with.”

For example, she said, she heard from news programs that the Affordable Care Act prohibited lifesaving care for elderly people with cancer....

For Mr. Elson, with advanced diabetes, chronic high blood pressure and an income too high for Medicaid but too low to pay all his bills, the Affordable Care Act came too late.

He had forgone insulin for most of the year when he arrived at his eye doctor’s office in September, huffing and puffing due to fluid in his lungs. He was off his blood pressure pills, too, and all of his medications except a drug he takes for neuropathic pain caused by diabetes. His swollen legs were covered in painful blisters where excess fluid had seeped out...

There, he was told something he had been dreading: his kidney function had dropped to less than 10 percent of the normal level, and he had to start dialysis to save his life. That would mean being hooked up to a machine four hours a day, three days a week, to clear the toxins and extra fluid from his body.

So, it's important to remember here that the default position on the right is to simply let people die. They deserve to die because they cannot afford health care. But, here's the thing, that's also apparently the default position on the left.

10 things political scientists know that you don't. (.pdf)

Political scientists rarely talk about special interests. We used to use language like “interest-group pluralism” to describe the resulting political environment. The most important distinction in this world is not between special and general interests, but between organized interests (like unions, religious groups, and the NRA) and unorganized interests (like the unemployed or homeless).