I'm not sure of what to think

Does adding a second bible add any substance, legitimacy or truth to what Trump swore to on Inauguration Day?  I doubt it.  It only serves to create an image of false piety for a man from whose mouth only comes lies - including the words "And" and "The".

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As I write this entry, less than two weeks have expired since Trump took office, and we're already seeing chaos in the land. Previously approved refugees, legal residents/green card holders, and other vetted people are being denied entry to the USA, because of Trump's latest executive order. How does this make us any safer? How does this make us appear to the rest of the world?  To me, it only gives nations such as Iran a propaganda advantage, as they will not reject previously approved holders of American passports from visiting their country. And to make things worse, the 3 Arabic speaking countries which are exempt from Trump's executive order (Egypt, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia) are those in which Trump has business interests.  Two of these countries (Saudi Arabia and the UAE) are countries that supplied the 19 hijackers that commandeered the planes on 9/11/01, killing almost 3,000 Americans.

An op-ed piece in the Huffington Post is already.talking about the inevitability of impeachment. But is that what a Democrat should be looking for?  Each day that Trump is in office, he tarnishes the GOP brand and helps to mobilize more potential Democratic voters - people who could be very useful in 2018 and 2020. When the Women's March gathered 3 times on the National Mall as many people as Trump's inauguration, one has a potential movement.  But when one takes into account the other 1,500,000 people protesting around the world, it's easy to see that a raw nerve has been touched.  We have to make sure that the reaction gets us the results we want.

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It is no accident that ALL of Trump's appointments have been to the extreme political right. His deal with Pence is likely the same he offered to John Kasich: You run both foreign and domestic affairs, while I make America great again.  Kasich has some ethics, Pence does not. He is a religious wingnut, someone more dangerous to us than Trump - something that I found hard to believe at first.  If we are stuck with a President Pence, he will follow the GOP policy with no compromises allowed. This is different from Trump, as he can easily be manipulated with flattery.  

The Huffington Post piece noted that Trump suffers from Malignant Narcissism.  Otto Kernberg characterizes it by an absence of conscience, a pathological grandiosity and quest for power, and a sadistic joy in cruelty. And everything said about Trump indicates a diagnosis of Malignant Narcissism would be one of the things high on the list of possibilities. Can we afford this in a national leader?

It is possible to manipulate someone like Trump.  It has often been said about him, that if you are the last to give him an opinion, he will often lean your way - as long as he feels in charge and feels that he is the strongest alpha male in the room.  However, it is much harder to manipulate someone like Pence, as his currency is power. Pence is smart enough to wait around until someone self destructs. And that's what Trump seems to be doing, seeing how much work and thought goes into being president.

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But I go back to the title of this entry, as it raises an important question: Is it in our best interest to help get Trump out of office, taking an immediate gain? Or, is it better to help Trump stay in office until the 2018 elections, preventing a potential President Pence from serving more than 6 years as President in his own right?  Can we afford the damage that Trump will do to this country in a little under than 720 days?  

I've already accepted that Trump will destroy as many external checks and balances as he can, regarding those we have on large businesses.  I've already accepted that Trump will be a disaster for the environment, given his belief that Global Warming is a Hoax.  And I've already accepted that he will be a disaster for human rights. Do we know ALL the risks of removing him from office either via impeachment or via the 25th amendment to the constitution?  I don't think so.  And that worries me.

And now, the real work must begin

The Affordable Care Act, or "Obamacare" as many people call it.  It's a flawed law meant to put true healthcare reform in play.  But the dysfunction of both political parties has locked in this law's provisions, the worst of them requiring people to buy unsubsidized insurance because their states didn't accept the medicaid expansion to cover these people.

One of the problems insurers have in America is that there is no price control on prescription drugs.  The largest buyer of these drugs is Medicare, and yet, the federal government prohibits Medicare and Medicaid from negotiating prices for drugs.  As a result, we have the highest costs for healthcare in the world.  No wonder why many insurers are bailing out of the Obamacare health insurance markets.

Another problem is the inability to force the states to expand Medicaid, even with a 90% Federal government subsidy for those costs. Without nationwide participation, a law like this will fail, as people will blame the law for their problems and not the law makers who won't tweak the law to make it work for all.  One might argue that this part of the law was a failure from the start. But in any law this complex, the drafters were likely to make errors.  If we looked at law as we do for computer systems, we accept the fact that there will be computer bugs, and that they will be fixed.  Why are many people condemning a law, when they should be condemning congress for not doing anything important in this area for generations, and then not fixing mistakes when they do something?

To me, an understated problem is the inability of insurers to get young adults to sign up for the higher levels of healthcare.  The ACA depends on a large number of young workers (who are in good health) to pay into the insurance plans, so that older, less healthy, people can buy affordable insurance.  Obamacare is a health care transfer from the young to the old, in the same way as Social Security is an income transfer program from the young to the old.  In both cases, it only makes sense.  In traditional societies, the young take care of the old. In an age of the sub-nuclear family, government mandated wealth and health transfers from young to the old make sense. Most people can no longer depend on their extended families for help.

There were many lies used to sell the public on the need for this law.  This is not uncommon with politicians.  FDR lied about keeping America neutral before WW2, even with the obvious signs that we could not avoid getting involved with this worldwide conflict.  And yet, people accept the story given by their political tribes, instead of seeing the reality behind the scenes of the kabuki theater of politics.  

Obamacare needs fixing.  There are not enough insurers willing to participate in markets where they can't make money.  There are not enough people covered by this law.  There are not enough choices available to people in need.  But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater.  If we get rid of Obamacare, we will return to a worse system than we have now. The only question is: Do we provide a "Public Option" or not?  If there is a public option, the average person will likely pay roughly the same rate as state employees do for their insurance plans.  (I use COBRA rates for my analysis.)  Without a public option, people will go uninsured.

Are we heading towards single payer healthcare?  Maybe.  But if private industry wants to keep making profits, it will have to find a way of fixing a system that was broken way before the ACA was enacted, and will need to find a way to do it within the spirit of the ACA.