Accurately representing millions of voters

For years we heard that Paul Ryan was one of the smart Republicans. He would present some complex economic plan, and the Very Serious People would praise it, except for a few spoilsports like Paul Krugman who would actually read it and demonstrate that it made no sense.

Now, as Charles Pierce and many others have pointed out, Ryan has proclaimed that insurance cannot work if healthy people have to pay more to subsidize the sick, which is the way insurance always works.

He is nowhere near alone. Many, many people who get one vote each used it to rid themselves of the scourge of Obamacare only to discover to their shock that doing so would coincidentally remove the ACA that is keeping them alive. (It’s international: “Let’s vote ourselves out of the European Union. OK, now let’s find out what the European Union is.”)

I really don’t want them to lose their health care. Nature punishes stupidity, but the purpose of society is to be less unforgiving than nature. In fact, I’d like all of us to have a real national health system like the first world does, and the worst that would befall the Trump trusters is the galling realization that the colored and the queers have it too.

Socially acceptable

Roz Kaveney on sf and respectability