Michael Cluck and his wife, of Edwardsville, Illinois, bought insurance through healthcare.gov in 2015 and it saved them $300 a month over what they were previously paying. But his insurer dropped out of the program and he was left with only one choice for 2017: Blue Cross/Blue Shield. The premiums and deductibles aren't bad, but the plan only covers doctors within his state, Illinois. It happens that Mr. Cluck developed prostate cancer some years ago, and the doctors who put his disease into remission and followed him subsequently were in St. Louis, which is in Missouri...but only about 30 minutes away. But Blue Cross/Blue Shield requires that he get treatment in-state, so he will have to go to doctors in Illinois for his semi-annual checkups, and he complains that they are farther away. Cluck now complains that the Affordable Care Act promised him that he could keep his doctors and still save $2,500 a year, but it has failed him, or so he claimed to the NPR reporter interviewing him. That's among the reasons why he voted for Donald Trump, he said. He said that, since the "health care companies"...that was the phrase he used, health care companies...were making record profits...again, his phrase, not mine...they shouldn't be dropping out of the program. That's it. The interviewer didn't ask Cluck any more questions, but there is a significant number of facts that Mr. Cluck left unstated, or at least that didn't get recorded in the interview: how much was he paying before the ACA and how much is he paying now; how much farther are his new doctors going to be than his old ones were; how much profit was the insurance company he used to have...the one that dropped out of ACA participation-- making and how did he know; if Blue Cross/Blue Shield allowed him to see his old doctors, would he still think the ACA had to be scrapped or seriously modified; is he still saving money over what he was paying before the ACA, and there are probably several more relevant questions that could have been asked, but apparently weren't. That's how Donald Trump got elected.
That may seem a brash statement, but the media allowed this kind of half-assed reporting to suffice as Donald Trump roamed the country claiming that the ACA was "a disaster," as he put it on every other nightly newscast we saw, and on NPR too. Donald Trump won on the basis of disinformation...not misinformation...disinformation, and the news media--media is plural incidentally, so the term doesn't refer to a single entity but rather to the mass of entities that we assume will actually give us the news, among other things, not just what we want to hear and what will generate ratings-- helped him disseminate it. We owe Trump's election to the media, not to misdirected Democratic policies, not to poor demographic data, not to an electorate that was dissected and parsed until every attempt to ascertain what should have been done over the past eight years but wasn't became unintelligible babble. The news media, which now apparently compete with unfettered sources of information like facebook and twitter among those who ostensibly want to inform themselves, failed to inform the great mass of American voters so that they could make an intelligent choice. Instead, they made the unfortunate, uninformed choice that Mr. Cluck made.
If you read sources like "The Federalist Papers" to ascertain what the founding fathers were thinking, you will discover that they weren't the populists conservatives want us to believe they were, and thus, the conservatives aren't the populists they want us to believe they are either. In number 62 of the Federalist Papers, Hamilton describes The Senate as necessary to damp the power of The House of Representatives because of the probable radical nature of a body elected directly by the people. The Senate therefore would be elected by the state legislatures, which would be composed of the more substantial and stable members of our society: the elite and wealthy. That was the original purpose of the electoral college too: to mitigate against the unpredictable nature of the American people as an electorate, and maybe they were right. The election of Donald Trump demonstrates that the people of this country are capable of almost incomprehensible caprice when electing presidents. And The Senate, since the constitution was changed about a hundred years ago to permit the people to choose senators too, The Senate has become gradually more partisan, irresponsible and ineffective as far as instituting the popular will in the form of law. The popular meme has been that this election was about change and the ascension of either the working man, the rural populace, or old white guys like me, but none of that is true. This election was about the willingness of the great mass of our people to be misled because they are too lazy, ill-informed or disinterested to find out what the truth is before they vote on the basis if what they think and believe.
If the electoral college was a buffer against that intellectual indolence, I would be in favor of keeping it. But in this day and age, long after the three-fifths compromise and the decision to let only men vote by our founding fathers, it serves no purpose at all. Hillary Clinton was the choice of the American people, and she should be our next president. She was bad enough, but Donald Trump? To coin one of his favorite phrases, he is going to be a disaster, and we have the electoral college and the founding fathers to thank for it.
Your friend,
Mike
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