They propagate slogans they feed into people's brains to keep them herded like captive cattle that reject any improvement in their lives:
The "American Way of Life" is code for accepting to be fleeced and robbed on the altar of putrid patriotism. How often have you been told to spend and consume as a patriotic duty to keep the economy going? No wonder y'all live in debt (your government is $40 trillion in debt!) and do not save enough for retirement.
"Limited Government", "Small Government, Big Results", "Keep government out of our lives" are slogans aiming at brainwashing people into accepting rapist corporations as friendly entities and be willing Stockholm Syndrome victims.
Slogans such as "Lower Taxes, More Jobs", "Championing Free Enterprise", and "Advocating for Fiscal Responsibility" intend to keep the average dumb American sequestered in an intellectual jail. Conservatism is in fact intellectual laziness: People who don't accept the inevitable built-in change in life and society (also known as progress) just don't want to learn new things and change their bad habits. They are conservatives. Trump is the perfect example of the dumb conservative. He generally doesn't want new technology (wind turbines, for example), doesn't understand climate change... but if it involves his bottom line he's all for it: Data centers are the latest example.
Conservatism - less regulations - also leaves established corrupt practices in place. When you change things, you in fact force a cleanup that allows you to discover the dust behind the furniture. Conservatives don't want to clean up because they don't want their practices exposed.
Conservatives are against new taxes because taxes generally provide more government services and better infrastructure (healthcare, transportation, etc.). In the US, infrastructure is decaying, having been built decades ago by progressive Democrat administrations. Electric lines still hang from Third-World-like poles and are often disabled during storms. Old gas lines often cause explosions and conservatives oppose any funding to replace decaying infrastructure. In the US, there is no decent advanced mass transportation to match the size and importance of the country. There are no fast/bullet/TGV-like trains, as is the case in Europe, China and Japan. In California for example, a fast train project running up and down the coast was allocated insufficient funding years ago and is now dead in the water because conservatives want to derail it (no pun intended). They prefer gasoline-driven cars and building more highways. In their propaganda, they equate owning a car and burning gasoline with some sort of "freedom".
In this universe of ours, stability doesn't exist, everything is in constant change. Unless there is intervention to force stability, things tend to decay on their own - the second law of thermodynamics in physics says that systems spontaneously decay from states of order towards states of disorder. Life for example counters this natural tendency by constantly importing energy to build order (organelles, cells, tissues, organs...) out of chemical chaos and prevent disorder (i.e. illness and death).
It was not a political statement that John Stuart Mill was making when he said “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives." He was perhaps innocently reflecting on the fact that conservatives stubbornly refuse change. Dumb people often are suspicious of novelty. Conservatives refuse to make the intellectual effort to adapt and inevitably fall behind. Life is in a constant state of adaptation to the constant change happening around it.
Some American conservatives are so dumb that they think the world was born in the 1950s and that it should remain there. Some even want to go back to the 1850s with nostalgia for slavery and a lawless "only-white" United States. I suspect some even want to go back to the Middle Ages when religion dominated every facet of life. The modern world with its constant discoveries - the electronics revolution, the genomics revolution... - is a scary place for dumb, intellectually-frozen conservatives.
The reason Americans tend to be conservative and religious is an evolutionary phenomenon: If you transplant a species from environment 1 to environment 2, the natural evolution that was taking place in environment 1 suddenly stops because the equilibrium that existed between the species and its environment is disrupted. Hence, the species has to first discover its new environment (number 2) to learn to adjust and adapt to it. Hence the transplanted individual members of that group become frozen for a while. Americans, as transplanted individuals from other corners of the world, face a new environment and do not yet know or understand that they have to change or how to change. They are frozen in the comfort of what they know and they fear novelty. It is this intellectual laziness that brings idiots like Trump to power in the US.
Way behind many advanced and wealthy nations, the US struggles with issues long put aside in these other nations. The US is like teenagers who don't understand the world and have to fuck up and make their own mistakes before becoming mature and at peace with themselves.
For now, for example, the US refuses to create a national health plan for ALL citizens on the pretexts I mentioned above. So Americans struggle as they are bamboozled by carnivorous health insurance wolves that promise them coverage as long as they pay their premiums. But then, when the shit hits the fan and people fall ill, the Golgotha of trying to get that much promised coverage suddenly begins. That much flaunted coverage vanishes.
Healthcare in the US is the most expensive and least efficient around the world. It may have leading edge research (thanks to its immigrant scientists, engineers and doctors) but every day patients suffering from treatable diseases and in need of "routine care" do not need "research". They need care over which health insurers torment them all the time.
Conservatives say they are for competition. But they fear to compete with the government. There is no free market in the US. There are oligopolies that run people's everyday lives and fleece them out of their money. If you incur medical debt because you can't pay for the care that insurers refuse to pay, you are punished by the other predators, the financial ones, who give you a bad "credit score".
=======================================================
Having Health Insurance Doesn’t Prevent Medical Debt
Alana Semuels
Thu, September 17, 2026
—Prapass Pulsub—Getty Images
Many people buy health insurance to protect themselves from catastrophes like car accidents or cancer leading to astronomical medical bills.
But even having health insurance is not guaranteed to keep people out of financial ruin.
Nearly one third of adults ages 19-64 with private insurance have unpaid medical bills or medical debt, according to a survey released September 17 by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that supports independent research on health care issues. Nearly half of adults who were paying off medical debts owed $2,000 or more.
"Medical-debt issues often stem from routine care, including doctor's office visits and treatment for chronic conditions," says Sara R. Collins, a senior scholar at the Commonwealth Fund and one of the authors of the report. High deductibles are another common source. "People are just dealing with routine care and bills that build up over time."
The study, which consisted of interviews among a nationally representative sample of more than 6,300 adults in 2025, also included analysis of focus groups in which people expanded on their experiences with health care. In the focus groups, many people expressed surprise at how high their medical bills were despite their insurance coverage, Collins says.
The problem of insured Americans with medical debt could grow in the coming years as health insurance becomes less affordable. Already, the cost of health benefits per employee is projected to rise 8.2% in 2027, the highest increase since 2003, according to an August survey by Marsh, and some employers may downgrade their plans and shift more costs to employees, employers told Marsh.
=======================================================
Having Health Insurance Doesn’t Prevent Medical Debt
Alana Semuels
Thu, September 17, 2026
—Prapass Pulsub—Getty Images
Many people buy health insurance to protect themselves from catastrophes like car accidents or cancer leading to astronomical medical bills.
But even having health insurance is not guaranteed to keep people out of financial ruin.
Nearly one third of adults ages 19-64 with private insurance have unpaid medical bills or medical debt, according to a survey released September 17 by the Commonwealth Fund, a foundation that supports independent research on health care issues. Nearly half of adults who were paying off medical debts owed $2,000 or more.
"Medical-debt issues often stem from routine care, including doctor's office visits and treatment for chronic conditions," says Sara R. Collins, a senior scholar at the Commonwealth Fund and one of the authors of the report. High deductibles are another common source. "People are just dealing with routine care and bills that build up over time."
The study, which consisted of interviews among a nationally representative sample of more than 6,300 adults in 2025, also included analysis of focus groups in which people expanded on their experiences with health care. In the focus groups, many people expressed surprise at how high their medical bills were despite their insurance coverage, Collins says.
The problem of insured Americans with medical debt could grow in the coming years as health insurance becomes less affordable. Already, the cost of health benefits per employee is projected to rise 8.2% in 2027, the highest increase since 2003, according to an August survey by Marsh, and some employers may downgrade their plans and shift more costs to employees, employers told Marsh.
What's more, after Congress decided not to renew subsidies for people buying health insurance from Affordable Care Act Exchanges, many consumers switched to lower quality plans that will cost them more if they have catastrophic or chronic health issues, according to April data from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The Commonwealth study found that 30% of survey respondents cut back on basic necessities like food, heat, or rent to afford health care, and that 37% of those with debt used part or all of their savings to pay their bills.
Once people experience medical debt, they often hesitate to seek out more medical care, says Collins. That can lead to higher expenses for everyone in the long run, as they end up needing emergency services instead of less expensive preventative care.
Medical debt weighs heavily on Americans, Collins says. "There is a huge fear among people in our focus groups of having their credit scores ruined by medical debt."
Fifteen states have passed various laws limiting the use of medical debt in lending decisions and on credit reports. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had finalized a federal rule designed to keep medical debt off credit reports and out of credit decisions, but a federal court vacated the rule in July 2025 after the Trump Administration took office.
The Commonwealth study found that 30% of survey respondents cut back on basic necessities like food, heat, or rent to afford health care, and that 37% of those with debt used part or all of their savings to pay their bills.
Once people experience medical debt, they often hesitate to seek out more medical care, says Collins. That can lead to higher expenses for everyone in the long run, as they end up needing emergency services instead of less expensive preventative care.
Medical debt weighs heavily on Americans, Collins says. "There is a huge fear among people in our focus groups of having their credit scores ruined by medical debt."
Fifteen states have passed various laws limiting the use of medical debt in lending decisions and on credit reports. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had finalized a federal rule designed to keep medical debt off credit reports and out of credit decisions, but a federal court vacated the rule in July 2025 after the Trump Administration took office.
No comments:
Post a Comment