Like Waiting For “One Direction” Tickets In A Blizzard

(SCENE:  Mitch BERG is walking his dog down Grand Avenue in Saint Paul.   He’s walking past an organic car repair shop when Avery LIBRELLE walks out, almost bumping into BERG).

LIBRELLE:  Merg!  Hah! I woke up this morning thinking “Merg must be feeling sad today! Obamacare is a huge success!”

BERG:  Well, it’s not really…

LIBRELLE:  Which bums you out more, Merg – that more people weren’t insured, or that less weren’t?

BERG:  Well, I’m just trying to figure out what all the happiness is about.

LIBRELLE:   Seven million subscribers!

BERG:  Let’s assume the Administration is giving real numbers.  That’s seven milion people who’ve signed up.  Not seven million paid, issued policies.  But if you put it up against the five million people wholosttheir coverage over the past year, that means we’re up a net two million – assuming they all actually pay their premiums, which all of them will not.

LIBRELLE:  You’re just jealous that no Republican healthcare plan gets people lining up for it!

BERG:  Wait – you say that’s a good thing!

LIBRELLE:  When people line up to buy something, that means it’s popular.    Like an iPhone!

BERG:  If that analogy held up – if Obamacare is extremely popular – then they’d have been waiting in line last October, when the plans first hit the market.  This is like people waiting in line to buy iPhone 3s before they go out of production.

LIBRELLE:  That’s stupid!  Nobody would do that!

BERG:  Unless it was your only shot at getting a phone, and you were going to wind up without a phone if you waited another day.  The “lines” had less in common with these…:

HyPsTrZ at the sacrament of unveiling.

…and much more in common with these…:

Waiting for bread in Moscow, 1980s

…or these:

Minnesota clinic, 2018. Just kidding – it’s a DMV line.

People trying to get something before an onerous deadline makes it impossible.

LIBRELLE:  Wow.  You’re a real debbie downer.

BERG:  As always, I’m a realist.  The Administration is trying to put lipstick on a dead pig in time to save the Democrats in time for the mid-terms.

LIBRELLE:  Hey – you used the word Democrat!  You hate women and their children!

(And SCENE)

10 thoughts on “Like Waiting For “One Direction” Tickets In A Blizzard

  1. If a publicly traded company, represented to their stockholders/the investing public that they sold product to 7 million new customers and then later revealed that 5 million previous customers are counted in that number and that after giveaways, lack of completed purchase agreements and customers who didn’t pay they actually had less than 2 million new customers, the SEC would show up with shotguns and subpoenas as well as raincoats for putting over senior management members heads as they frog marched them out the front door for a perp walk orchestrated with the gathered media. But, this is a Democrat Party-Massive Government Complex operation and a similar scenario is reported as a “victory” by our Democrat Dominated Media Culture.

  2. 7 million signed up, minus 5 million who had insurance but it was canceled because of Obamacare so they HAD to sign up, minus however many would have gotten Medicaid anyway, leaves 47 million uninsured, most of them young and healthy.

    Aren’t we right back where we started?

  3. “BERG: As always, I’m a realist. The Administration is trying to put lipstick on a dead pig in time to save the Democrats in time for the mid-terms.”

    Is it a genuine Huangpu dead river pig?

  4. Aren’t we right back where we started?
    No, we aren’t, Joe Doakes. The Federal government — the least democratic level of American government — now controls all healthcare insurance in the United States. Sooner or later, probably sooner, they will get around to doing to healthcare what the CRA did to the mortgage business.

  5. Second on NW’s comment, but I’ll go further; it would be a blessing to simply stop pissing away MORE billions and be right back where we started.

  6. I suspect that all our futures will hold a lot of waiting in lines. With, of course, “cuts” allowed for the chosen ones. I will be sure to wear a hat to both keep me warm and to have when being “hat in hand” seemse appropriate …

  7. Scott: or Enron, or for that matter the Labor Department, whose jobless estimates are deliberate fiction, it appears.

    But only the private sector is legally liable for this kind of nonsense, it seems.

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