Conservatives Move To Trying

To that end, Brase launched the “Refuse to Enroll” campaign earlier this month on her daily radio show, “Health Freedom Minute,” which is broadcast on more than 350 stations nationwide, including the American Family Radio Network with stations throughout Ohio.

“Contrary to popular belief, non-enrollment in the exchanges does not result in any penalties; fines are only for failure to be insured,” said Brase, whose organization claims the law will limit consumers’ choices, threaten their privacy and increase the cost of health insurance. “We look at the law as being unconstitutional because it’s a government takeover of health care, so we want to make it difficult for the law to function as its proponents want it to.”

Conservatives are just hellbent on trying to keep poor people from getting decent health coverage. The right-wing intelligentsia can claim otherwise, but the plain truth is that no one in the actual governing wing of the Republican Party wants to replace Obamacare with Hands free access. They just want to repeal it, full stop. For some reason, the mere idea of poor and working-class people getting medical care with taxpayer help drives them into conniptions.

his campaign is only about the exchanges. So when Drum says “taxpayer help”, he means simply the cost of setting up and running the exchanges. This is critical, because lower enrollment numbers will not really affect the amount of taxpayer money being spent on the exchanges—the exchanges are basically a virtual market funded by the government, and the number of customers strolling through doesn’t really change the cost of maintaining a market space. So this isn’t, no matter what our inevitable half-educated screeching trolls will claim, about saving taxpayer money. This has nothing to do with the “taxpayer” part, and just with the “help” part—and really, it’s mostly about access.

I said it repeatedly during the battles over health care reform and I’ll say it again: Most of the paranoia and hysteria coming from the right over Obamacare (they’ll regret naming it after him when the exchanges plus subsidies become one of the most popular government programs running 10 years hence) boils down to one of the most base emotions on the right: The fear and disgust that boils up when they fear they will have to share something with lower class people. I’ve dubbed it the “waiting room problem”: conservatives are deeply, unshakably afraid that once the uninsured start getting insurance, they’ll have to sit next to them in doctors’ waiting rooms, and that’s what they don’t want to happen.

You may laugh, but if you think about it, this fear of having to share spaces with “others” who have less money than they do—and who may be, gasp, different than they are—drives a whole shitload of conservative policy preferences and hang-ups. The hostility towards any attempt to improve public transportation is expressing a direct preference for unmanageable traffic over having to sit on a train or a bus with poor people (even though no one actually makes you use public transportation, but I guess the mere temptation of using the train is so serious that the rest of us have to give access).

Hatred of immigrants and the ugly hostility towards cities? Same thing. There’s a tendency on the right to see lower income people as inherently contaminating, as if their very presence degrades everything around them by the force of magic or something. Witness George Will blaming “culture”—which is a conservative code word for the presence of lower income people and definitely for lower income people of color—for the problems Detroit is facing. Pay special attention to his freak-out over reading and real time Location system.

Being literate is a learned behavior; outside of those with learning disorders, it is not about anything inherent to the person. The reason that one school lags behind another in reading is because of social investment in that school and not anything to do with the inherent qualities of the students. Usually there are not enough teachers or the schools are falling apart or there aren’t enough resources.

Often, schools in poverty-stricken districts have outside problems coming in, too, such as students who don’t have enough rest or food, or have stressful situations outside the school doors that make it hard to study. All these problems have solutions, usually involving investment in communities and investment in decent paying jobs, but Will seems rock solid certain that it’s the poor people themselves that are the problem, that their mere presence is a contaminant that spreads—people themselves are viewed as the problem to be avoided or contained, instead of as people who have problems, such as lack of health care, that need to be fixed.

On the contrary, to the conservative mind, the last thing you want to do is help fix people’s problems, because the fixes usually involve creating situations where various classes of people have more contact. That’s how conservative thinking goes: If working class people have insurance, they’ll go to the doctor. It might be my doctor and then their very presence will ruin everything!

While this kind of paranoid thinking seems too idiotic to be possible, it’s evident all over conservative media and not just in Will’s prissy rants. It’s really common, for instance, for conservatives to suggest that health care is going to physically resemble a soup kitchen line. It’s not subtle, either—my Google search for “health care lines” turned this up as the first image.

I moved to California, and eventually did end up finding our angels, but we still needed more. We had underestimated the time we needed to make a polished and interesting multiplayer shooter and so we turned to our fans. We saw what the Overgrowth guys were doing and were inspired to try it out. We worked hard on our first game teaser, writing the tools and technology we needed for it alongside it. All the while we knew we had a very limited amount of funds left before we had to release the teaser and pray that our fans would support us.

We launched the teaser along with our NS2 pre-order program. $20 for the Standard Edition and $40 for the Special Edition, which granted you early alpha access and limited edition black marine armor. We were blown away when we raised over $200k in the first week and eventually went on to raise over $1M. Surprisingly, over 90% of our players opted for the Special Edition. That’s when the trouble began.

The first alpha we shipped to our players was a dreadful buggy mess. It’s no wonder: we were a team of 4, building a next-gen engine, tools and game. We were laying the tracks in front of a speeding train. We promised that our beta would be much better, but we were doomed to fail. It was another two years after our “beta” before we shipped v1.0 on Steam, and our fans were not happy about having a junky game in the meantime. We heard from many players that they were happy to support us just on the merits of the original free game alone, and that they would be happy even if we never shipped NS2. But we’re sure many players didn’t feel that way and often let us know it. Opening e-mail was dreadful. Reading our forums was downright painful. This reaction also caused our investors to panic and lose faith in us.