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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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What Do Republicans Think About Obamacare

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What Do Republicans Think About Obamacare

Isans Are Split On The Supreme Court Overturning The Aca

McCain: To Think We Can Repeal Obamacare ‘Is Not Rational’

In June 2020, the Trump administration issued a brief asking the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the ACA. The brief was filed in support of an ongoing challenge to the ACA by a group of Republican attorneys general in California v. Texas, a case that challenges the legality of the ACA in light of the zeroing out of the individual mandate penalty in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Acts. The death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on September 18 and the possibility of the Senate confirming a new Justice appointed by President Trump before the presidential election has brought heightened attention to the potential outcome of this case and the future of the ACA. In October 2020, a majority of the public said they do not want to see the Supreme Court overturn the 2010 health care law, and eight in ten said they do not want to see the ACAs protections for people with pre-existing conditions overturned. There are partisan differences on both questions, with the majority of Democrats and independents saying they dont want the Court to overturn the ACA or pre-existing condition protections. However, among Republicans, three-fourths say they want to see the ACA overturned, but two-thirds say they do not want to see pre-existing condition protections overturned.

Figure 2: Majorities Do Not Want Court To Overturn ACAs Pre-Existing Condition Protections, Republicans Want Entire Law Overturned

Majority Of Millennials Under 30 Believe Costs Will Rise And Quality Will Fall Under Health Reform

Between 50 and 51 percent of young people believe their cost of care will increase under the health reform law; approximately one-in-ten tell us that their costs will likely decrease.; Young Americans who think their health care costs will increase are much less likely to enroll in the insurance program mandated by the 2010 legislation.; Sixty percent of those who say they are unlikely to enroll in the Affordable Care Act program believe that their costs under the program would increase, which is significantly higher than those who say they will enroll in the program

Young Americans under 30 tell us that the news media is a primary source of information related to the presidents health care initiative, with 67 percent of those who were asked about the Affordable Care Act saying that the news was a primary source, and 72 percent saying the same when they were asked about Obamacare.; Friends and social media were the second leading source followed by Healthcare.gov .; Those who are unlikely to enroll are significantly more likely to have received information about the programs through the news media and their employer .

Poll: Obamacare More Popular Than Ever

A sign in favor of the Affordable Care Act is held up outside the Supreme Court building after the … court’s ruling in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, June 28, 2012. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the core of President Barack Obama’s health-care overhaul, giving him an election-year triumph and preserving most of a law that would expand insurance to millions of people and transform an industry that makes up 18 percent of the nation’s economy. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

BLOOMBERG NEWS

The Affordable Care Act wins 55% support among the public for its highest rating since becoming law nearly a decade ago, according to the latest Kaiser Family Foundation tracking poll released Friday.

Kaiser said the clear majority of support is the highest in more than 100 polls the nonprofit health foundation has conducted. The ACA was signed into law in 2010 by President Barack Obama and has expanded health insurance coverage to more than 20 million Americans.

The recent uptick reflects strong support among Democrats, 85% of whom now express favorable views, Kaiser said in its analysis. A narrow majority of independents also view the law favorably. While most Republicans still hold unfavorable views towards the ACA, the poll suggests that Republican voters have largely moved on from efforts to repeal the ACA and now rank opposition to a single-payer government health plan like Medicare-for-all among their top health priorities.;;

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Obamacare Repeal Requires Replacement After 2016 Election

Republicans had spent eight years trashing the Democratic health care overhaul, but now that they were in power, they ran up against the same political winds that forced ObamaCare tolook like such a political Frankensteins monster to begin with. Conservatives wanted a complete and total repeal of the law; moderative Republicans wanted to protect certain pieces of it.

America Should Deport Illegal Immigrants

Republicans believe that illegal immigrants, no matter the reason they are in this country, should be forcibly removed from the U.S. Although illegal immigrants are often motivated to come to the U.S. by companies who hire them, Republicans generally believe that the focus of the law should be on the illegal immigrants and not on the corporations that hire them.

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Universal Coverage Vs Market

Democrats generally continue to support the Affordable Care Act , but would like to fix its flaws and generally improve the law. Democrats want to empower states to use innovation waivers to create their own approaches to healthcare reform that are as good asor better thanthe current system. Many Democrats also support fixing the ACAs family glitch by basing affordability calculations for employer-sponsored coverage on family premiums rather than employee-only premiums, and most also support expanding premium subsidies to higher income ranges in order to soften the subsidy cliff.

But increasingly, Democrats are also getting behind the idea of a transition to some sort of universal coverage system. All of the Democrats who ran for the 2020 presidential nomination were in favor of universal coverage, although they had differing opinions on whether we should transition entirely to a single-payer system or use a combination of government-run and private health coverage .

Bidens healthcare proposal also calls for an end to surprise balance billing, premium-free coverage under the public option for people who are caught in the Medicaid coverage gap , and allowing Medicare to negotiate prices with drug companies.

The Republican Party has not rolled out a new healthcare platform for 2020, and is instead utilizing the same platform they had in 2016. So in general, their approach can be expected to be the same as it has been for the past several years.

What Obamacare Republican Candidates Go Mum On Health Care Law

WASHINGTON Sen. Cory Gardner ran his first Senate campaign railing against the newly enacted Affordable Care Act, but six years later, the once-maligned law is getting little mention in his bid for re-election.

The Colorado Republican isnt alone.

After years of campaigning against Obamacare, Republicans trying to retain control of the Senate appear to be conceding that attacking the ACA is no longer politically advantageous, a shift compounded by the millions of people who now depend on the law for their coverage, including protections for pre-existing conditions.

Now with Obamacare being entrenched into people’s daily lives, they just don’t want their health care messed with, and so it becomes hard for Republicans to articulate on that point, said Doug Heye, who worked on repeal efforts in 2014 as deputy chief of staff to then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va.

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Republicans Who Think Nobody Would Miss Obamacare Should Ask People Who Depend On It

Some of the Republicans agitating to repeal Obamacare say they arent worried about taking health insurance away from more than 20 million people. Their theory: The program is wildly unpopular and even the people with coverage wouldnt miss it, no matter what takes it place.

People have crappy insurance, Rep. John Shimkus told Politico last week. This fear that theyre going to lose something that they dont think they have anyway is crazy.

Anna Meyers would beg to differ.

Meyers, 42, lives in the eastern part of North Carolina. She and her husband, 59, have been getting insurance through healthcare.gov for the last three years. Meyers also has a son, 14, who has autism. He gets coverage through Medicaid a program that Republicans say they would like to shrink just as soon as they are done with Obamacare.

Meyers works as an office manager for an accountant. Her husband does repair work for a company that manages rental homes. Between the two of them, she figures, their income is about $40,000 a year maybe less when his business is slow.

We dont get to go out to the movies a whole lot, Meyers explained to me on the phone. But we do travel a lot on the weekend, in our car, and see some of the bigger towns in the area just to get out.

Also, there is date night once a week. They drop her son at her parents house, and then bring home takeout. Smithfields Chicken is a favorite.

The Majority Of People With Obamacare Seem To Value It

Republicans Have A Health Plan Finally

What Do Republicans Believe?

The House Republican Study Committee has come out with a viable plan.

Getty

For the past ten years Republicans in Congress have been largely AWOL on health care.

If memory serves, there has never been a hearing to showcase the victims of Obamacare. Nor has there been a hearing to show how sensible reforms could make the lives of those victims better.

When it came to legislation, the GOP only had two ideas: either abolish Obamacare entirely or toss it to the states. Neither approach actually solved a health care problem. They just allowed Republicans in Washington to wash their hands of the issue and pass the problems along to someone else.

Until now.

The House Republican Study Committee has accepted the challenge and delivered. In a 68-page document, it identifies the worse problems in our health care system and shows how they can be solved.

The proposals are bold, impactful and easy to understand. Here is a quick summary.

Personal and portable health insurance. In an ideal world, if people like the insurance they get from an employer, they would be able to take it with them from job to job and in and out of the labor market. Under the Obama administration, this practice was not only illegal, employers who bought individually owned insurance for their employees faced huge fines.

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Harris On Voting Rights

As voting rights bills fizzle in Congress, Vice President Kamala Harris looks to fire up voters for 2022, Noah Bierman reported. Sen. Joe Manchin this week floated a compromise voting rights proposal that he said he hoped Republicans would support, but Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky slammed the door on that effort. Given Senate rules that require 60 votes for passage of most legislation, McConnells opposition would probably doom a bill. Many Democrats hope that issue will motivate their supporters in key races in the midterm election.

What Can Trump Do

Mr Trump has signed an executive order directing federal departments to take actions to ease the regulatory requirements from Obamacare.

The directive, which offered few specific details, appeared to be more of a broad mission statement.

However, the order could undermine the law’s individual mandate by granting more exemptions to people who do not want to buy health insurance.

Though it will take Congress to repeal major parts of Obamacare, Mr Trump could also cripple it with a stroke of a pen.

As president, he could simply drop the federal government’s appeal against a lawsuit, House v Burwell, which Republican House of Representatives members won in April 2016.

That legal action argued the Obama administration was unconstitutionally spending money that Congress had not formally appropriated by reimbursing health insurers who provide coverage to low-income policyholders.

If Mr Trump opts to drop the government’s challenge, insurers who are currently giving deep discounts to half their customers would lose their reimbursements. And that, say analysts, would send Obamacare into a death spiral.

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Board Of Governors Professor School Of Public Affairs & Administration

The Trump administrations efforts to sabotage the ACA and their consequences receive detailed attention in a recently released Brookings book, Trump, the Administrative Presidency, and Federalism. For present purposes, I highlight six major sabotage initiatives which emerged in the wake of congressional failure to repeal and replace the ACA.

1. Reduce outreach and opportunities for enrollment in the ACAs insurance exchanges. Established to offer health insurance to individuals and small business, the exchanges have provided coverage to some 10 million people annually. The Obama administration had vigorously promoted the ACA in part to attract healthy, younger people to the exchanges to help keep premiums down. The Trump administration sharply reduced support for advertising and exchange navigators while reducing the annual enrollment period to about half the number of days.

2. Cut ACA subsidies to insurance companies offering coverage on the exchanges. ACA proponents saw insurance company participation on the exchanges as central to fostering enrollee choice and to fueling competition that would lower premiums. The law therefore provided various subsidies to insurance companies to reduce their risks of losing money if they participated on the exchanges. The Trump administration joined congressional Republicans in reneging on these financial commitments.

A Majority Of Young People Disapprove Of The New Health Care Law

With the deadline to enroll in the presidents new health care law quickly approaching and a large effort underway by the administration and interest groups to encourage more young people to either enroll or not enroll in health coverage, we were interested in gaining a better understanding of young Americans views toward the new law.; To help better understand the messaging, we conducted a split sample asking respondents about approval, quality, cost, and how they were hearing about the law identifying it for n=1,024 respondents as the Affordable Care Act and for n=1,065 respondents as Obamacare.; While we did not find drastic differences between the two names there were some that existed and they are noted below.

Most significantly, when young Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 were asked if they approve or disapprove of the comprehensive health reform package that the president signed into law in 2010, a solid majority disapproved.; When the law was referred to as the Affordable Care Act, 39 percent of young Americans under 30 approved, 56 percent disapproved; and when the law was referred to as Obamacare, the numbers were nearly identical with 38 percent citing approval and 57 percent citing that they disapproved.; These findings mirror recent ABC News/Washington Post polling reporting that 40 percent of adults nationwide support the federal law making changes to the health care system, while 57 percent oppose it.

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Support For The Affordable Care Act

Then along comes Donald Trump and threatens to cut off subsidies for low-income Americans, ostensibly as a method to force Democrats in Congress to come to the negotiating table. A New York Times editorial summarised it: It sounds more like a two-bit Hollywood villain promising carnage if he doesnt get his way. Holding his own voters hostage to prove a point is not really the best political move for someone elected by a combination of low-wage workers from rural and industrial America and high-income families. But the Republican health plan what pundits are labeling TrumpRyan care advocates decreasing financial support for those worse off while decreasing taxes for the rich. And just to top it off, support for the ACA is currently at its highest point ever with 55% of Americans approving of it a complete reversal prior to the November election.

Even one of the most conservative columnists in the Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer a nonpractising psychiatrist wrote a column in April where he admitted that the ACA had changed the zeitgeist. It is universalising the idea of universal coverage. Acceptance of its major premise that no one be denied health care is more widespread than ever.

Now, how is that for progress!

Opinionwe Want To Hear What You Think Please Submit A Letter To The Editor

Despite what they say on television about protecting the most vulnerable, one by one the Republican senators are all getting in line behind Trumps Supreme Court nominee. We dont yet know who that is, but we can assume how he or she will vote on Obamacare.

People with pre-existing conditions like me are again terrified of losing our insurance, this time in the midst of a pandemic. Weve lived through years of scary uncertainty and now months of sheltering in place. Enough is enough. We are all health care voters now. Well see whether our wavering senators are health care voters, too.

Laura Packard is a Denver-based health care advocate and cancer survivor. She is the founder of Health Care Voices, a non-profit grassroots organization for adults with serious medical conditions, co-chair of Health Care Voter, and runs the pharma accountability campaign for Hero Action Fund. Follow her on Twitter:

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Less Than One Third Of Uninsured Millennials Under 30 Plan To Enroll

Regardless of the term used in describing the federal health reform package, less than one-in-four young Americans under the age of 30 report that they would definitely or probably enroll in insurance through an exchange if and when they are eligible. Forty-seven percent tell us that they will probably not or definitely not enroll under the ACA program, 45 percent say the same under Obamacare.;

Among the 22 percent of people under 30 who do not have health insurance presently, 29 percent say they will roll in the program described as Obamacare, and 25 percent say the same when its referred to as the Affordable Care Act.One of the most telling predictors of likelihood to enroll is political affiliation.; Less than ten percent of Republicans plan to enroll in an exchange, less than 20 percent of Independents — and between 35 and 40 percent of Democrats, depending on the name associated with the law.; Obamacare proves to be five percent more beneficial when Democrats are considering enrollment compared to the Affordable Care Act .

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gch1995 · 3 years ago

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@mynameisanakin

Thanks, and yeah, this wasn’t a defense of Anakin’s crimes, nor are the PT movies. The point was that abuse, corruption, crime, neglect, and complacency in the broken systems from which those issues stem are a breeding ground for it to occur all over again in the next generation, especially when victims have little to no healthy support or easy viable escape options from that toxicity in their environments.

Anakin did become complicit in that abuse, crime, and corruption as an adult for selfish reasons in his desperation, which he did feel conflicted about, so we do have to hold him accountable. However, he also always was a victim of it, especially because escape wasn’t an easy option from that toxicity that was breaking him, too. Both are possible. It’s the same thing with Obi Wan, Padme, the overall old Republic, and the overall Jedi Order before Luke reformed it. These people in the PT are victims who also became complicit perpetrators of that abuse, corruption, and toxicity they were taught to rationalize in order to survive and/or “be good.” Even when he turned to the dark side in his selfish desperation over potential abandonment, then did terrible things, and went completely batshit in ROTS, while Anakin did feel intensely guilty afterwards, Palpatine/Sidious had been grooming him to rationalize the crimes he asked him to commit against the Jedi Order/Republic, as “heroic” and “good” for 14 years, which is kind of why that whole plot point about Padme dying in his dreams wasn’t really necessary to convince him to turn, but they had to find an explanation as to why Luke and Leia were separated at birth from their mother after finding out their dad was Vader. Plus, death of loved ones and/or potential of abandonment through death in the future of loved one, was also shown to be a trigger for Anakin’s dark side in AOTC because he developed an attachment disorder after becoming unstable in a war zone after having to leave his mom in slavery, so he got too never got encouraged to healthily cope and recover.

I also definitely agree with the C-PTSD and high functioning autism headcanons for Anakin. He acts like someone who has no agency in his life at all because his entire life is a toxic mess of oppression with no truly good options for finding healthy, safety and secure escape routes from it. No, that doesn’t make committing murder okay, nor does it mean he’s entirely innocent of his crimes because he does have a conscience and more agency than he thinks, even if it is very little, but I think it’s ridiculous how so many fans act like he’s solely responsible for his crimes when his life is constantly filled with odds that are stacked against him, no matter what he does, anyway.

They had options to do better because every human being does, so they’re not excused, but they were very limited to nonexistent options because they either came from nothing and/or knew nothing outside of the cycle of abuse, corruption, oppression, poverty, neglect, trauma, toxicity, and war around them in their environments. They were conditioned to accept and perpetuate it. They were taught to believe that their personal choices, feelings, opinions, and values about right versus wrong didn’t matter, or it didn’t really help trying to speak up for themselves most of their lives whenever they tried more often than not, anyway, because they got shut down every time, so eventually, they succumbed and became perpetrators/complicit/enforcers/enablers of that abuse, crime, and corruption as well after being conditioned to accept it as “right” for so many years.

I think the only one with pure evil motives in the PT series is Palpatine. Granted, even the Jedi Council were willing to commit treason against him, too, except for Anakin.

I place primary blame on Yoda for corruption in the Jedi Order because he came up with the system, and never got brainwashed to be indoctrinated into it, so he had the most power to change it when he saw problems potentially arising, but did nothing, Palpatine for grooming Anakin to create the Empire, and whoever first created the broken Republic government rules and thought the well-being of poor people on the outer rims didn’t matter.

Maybe the reason your opinion is unpopular is because it is blatantly false and relies on misreadings of the source material so severe i can only assume they were deliberate on your part. Obi Wan Kenobi did not "abuse" anybody you pedantic moron.

I beg to differ. Several of the tactics he’s using are consistent with the definition of emotional/psychological abuse and even a bit of physical abuse.

This is the definition of emotional abuse, according to verywellmind.com: “The underlying goal of emotional abuse is to control the victim by discrediting, isolating, and silencing.”

Does Obi Wan show a consistent pattern of these behaviors in order to be considered an emotional abuser? Let’s see.

Examples of emotional blackmail, denial, and humiliation of Anakin’s and Luke’s reasonable accusations, opinions, and questions.

Well, Anakin actually has an absolutely valid point here that protection is a job for security guards, not Jedi. All he asked was why the Jedi had to guard Senator Amidala, but not security guards. Then, he tried to demonstrate his knowledge of the Jedi Code as an example. Immediately, Obi Wan humiliated him his student who is 16 years younger than him by acting shocked when Anakin tried to express his completely valid opinion. This implies that he usually doesn’t try to stick up for himself or offer his own opinions most of the time.

https://youtu.be/p3e4hUT5OmY

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• Suggesting that your perceptions are wrong or that you cannot be trusted by saying things like "you're blowing this out of proportion" or "you exaggerate"

Here Luke rightfully calls out Obi Wan for lying to him about his father being dead and all Obi Wan says, “ Your father was seduced by the dark side and when that happened the good man Anakin Skywalker was dead, so what I told you was true from a certain point of view.” That is denial of responsibility for doing something wrong by making Luke feel crazy for having a completely valid accusation of Obi Wan lying to him about his father being Darth Vader. The correct response would have been “I’m sorry I lied, Luke. I just didn’t want for you to feel conflicted about killing your father. I wanted to protect you.” What he’s doing here is called gaslighting.

https://youtu.be/2nO0uJenOgw

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More emotional blackmail here by faking his death to get a reaction from Anakin here:

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https://youtu.be/ppeCFJmibO8

• Act superior by exaggerating your flaws, criticizing you, and being sarcastic.

He does this a lot with Anakin by talking down to him in a condescending and sarcastic manner. Even when he comes to save his master from being executed, Obi Wan acts like a sarcastic and ungrateful dick by saying “Good job” and “Finally, you showed up.” Not one sincere, “Thank goodness you saved me, Anakin!”

https://youtu.be/ag7HdiN8FRQ

youtube

• Attempts to control and isolate you from outside connections, such as his whole reaction over Anakin having a crush on Padme. I know “no attachments” is a thing, and Anakin and Padme, while cute until the end of ROTS, got married too fast. I know he’s being an enforcer of Yoda’s cult like system, but forbidding Anakin from falling in love, making friends, and/or wanting a family is not healthy. It is emotional abuse. No, this life of total emotional repression/denial was not something Anakin consented to when he joined the order as a child, nor was it really as much of an autonomous choice for him to say no to joining when he came from a life of abuse, slavery, and poverty. Becoming a Jedi was his best chance for survival.

https://youtu.be/ia-uwlDTeUQ

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• This whole scene of the fight between Anakin and Obi Wan here has him committing a war crime. Absolutely, you can make a valid point that Anakin was worthy of a clean death penalty or long term imprisonment for his crimes here. Amputating him of all his organic limbs when he does that flip, then leaving him burn alive, while just watching him burn, and criticizing him as it happens? That’s an entirely inhumane fate a fate worse than death I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. Don’t tell me that Obi Wan didn’t have the opportunity to give Anakin a clean and quick death penalty here when he did that flip. He absolutely did. That would have been the kind thing to do for him at this point. He was too much of a coward to do it. I also think, even subconsciously, some part of Obi Wan wanted to see him suffer for his crimes because he was feeling vindictive deep down. You can’t tell me that if he really was thinking about being wholly kind and loving towards Anakin in that moment, he would have left him to suffer a fate this agonizingly awful for his crimes. I think some small part of him was thinking that death would be too kind of a fate for Anakin.

https://youtu.be/8631ukAVr6g

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#tw: abuse #pt star wars #ot star wars #obi wan critical #obi wan was not a good teacher to either of the skywalker boys #luke skywalker #anakin skywalker #darth vader #anti yoda #anti Palpatine #yes Anakin became a villain in his frantic desperation and he had more agency to make better choices than he believed #yes he deserved punishment for his crimes #but the whole point is that he also was always a victim with limited options and shitty support #no one is innocent or ideal as a hero in the main cast of the prequels #they’re all victims who become complicit and perpetuate this abuse and corruption they got taught to rationalize and perpetuate #Luke was the hero and the ideal gray Jedi they all needed #the cycle of abuse crime violence and oppression is hard to break when you’ve been taught to rationalize it #and you have limited options for support and escape to something better

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science-criticaltheory · 8 years ago

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A Nation of the Walking Dead by Chris Hedges

Mr. Fish / Truthdig

Opioids and experiences that simulate the deadening effects of narcotics are mechanisms to keep us submissive and depoliticized. Desperate citizens in Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel “Brave New World” ingested the pleasure drug soma to check out of reality. Our own versions of soma allow tens of millions of Americans to retreat daily into addictive mousetraps that generate a self-induced autism.

The United States consumes 80 percent of opioids used worldwide, and more than 33,000 died in this country in 2015 from opioid overdoses. There are 300 million prescriptions written and $24 billion spent annually in the U.S. for painkillers. Americans supplement this mostly legal addiction with over $100 billion a year in illicit marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin. And nearly 14 million U.S. adults, one in every 13, regularly abuse alcohol.

But these monetary figures are far less than what we spend on gambling. Americans in 2013 lost $119 billion gambling, with an additional $70 billion—or $300 for every adult in the country—spent on lottery tickets.

Federal and state governments, reliant on tax revenues from legal gambling and on lottery ticket sales, will do nothing to halt the expansion of the industry or the economic and psychological toll it exacts on those in financial distress. State-run lottery games had sales of $73.9 billion in 2015, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries. This revenue is vital to budgets beset by declining incomes, deindustrialization and austerity. “State lotteries provided more revenue than state corporate-income taxes in 11 of the 43 states where they were legal, including Delaware, Rhode Island, and South Dakota,” Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic. “The poorest third of households buy half of all lotto tickets,” he noted. Gambling is a stealth tax on poor people hoping to beat the nearly impossible odds. Governmental income from gambling is an effort to make up for the taxes the rich and corporations no longer pay.

Slot machines and other electronic gambling devices are engineered to draw us into an Alice-in-Wonderland rabbit hole. They, like our personal computers and hand-held devices, cater to the longing to flee from the oppressive world of dead-end jobs, crippling debt and social stagnation and a dysfunctional political system. We become rats in a Skinner box , frantically pulling levers until we are addicted and finally entranced by our compulsion to achieve fleeting, intermittent and adrenaline-driven rewards. Much like what happens to people using slot machines, the pigeons or rats in Skinner’s experiments that did not know when they would get a reward, or how much they would get, became the most heavily addicted to operating the levers or pedals. Indeed, Skinner used slot machines as a metaphor for his experiments.

The engineers of America’s gambling industry are as skillful at forming addiction as the country’s top five opioid producers—Purdue Pharma, Johnson & Johnson, Insys Therapeutics, Mylan and Depomed. There are 460 commercial casinos, 486 tribal casinos, 350 card rooms, 55 racetracks and hundreds of thousands of gaming devices, many located in convenience stores, gas stations, bars, airports and even supermarkets.

The rush of anticipation, available in 20-second bursts, over hours, days, weeks and months creates an addictive psychological “zone” that the industry calls “continuous gaming productivity.” Heart rates and blood pressure rise. Time, space, the value of money and human relationships hypnotically dissolve. A state of extreme social isolation occurs.

Gambling addicts, like many addicts, are often driven to crime, bankruptcy and eventual imprisonment. Many lose everything—their marriages, their families, their jobs, their emotional health and sometimes their lives. Gambling addicts have the highest rate of suicide attempts among addicts of any kind—1 in 5, or 20 percent—according to the National Council on Problem Gambling.

Donald Trump is in large part a product of gambling culture. His career has not been about making products but about selling intangible and fleeting experiences. He preys on the desperate by offering them escapist fantasies. This world is about glitter, noise and hype—Trump called the Trump Taj Mahal, his now-closed casino, “the eighth wonder of the world.” The more money you spent, the greater your “value,” the more you were pampered, given free hotel rooms and gifts, handed passes to special “clubs” with lavish buffets. Scantily clad hostesses hovered around you serving complimentary drinks. If you spent big, you were invited to exclusive parties attended by supermodels and famous athletes. Decorated chips—some featuring a photo of Donald Trump—turned cash into a species of Monopoly money. But in the end, when you were broke, when there was no more money in your bank account and your credit cards were maxed out, you were thrown back, in even greater financial distress, into the dreary universe you tried to obliterate.

Roger Caillois, the French sociologist, wrote that the pathologies of a culture are captured in the games the culture venerates. Old forms of gambling such as blackjack and poker allowed the gambler to take risks, make decisions and even, in his or her mind, achieve a kind of individualism or heroism at the gambling table. They provided a way, it can be argued, to assert an alternative identity for a brief moment. But the newer form, machine gambling, is an erasure of the self. Slot machines, which produce 85 percent of the profits at casinos, are, as the sociologist Henry Lesieur wrote, an “addiction delivery device.” They are “electronic morphine,” “the crack cocaine of gambling.” They are not about risk or about making decisions, but about creating somnambulism, putting a player into a trancelike state that can last for hours. It is a pathway, as sociologist Natasha Dow Schüll points out, to becoming the walking dead. This yearning for a state of nonbeing is what Sigmund Freud called “the death instinct.” It is the overpowering drive by a depressed and traumatized person to seek pleasure in a self-destructive activity that ultimately kills the organism.

“It is not the chance of winning to which they become addicted,” Schüll writes in “Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas,” “rather, what addicts them is the world-dissolving state of subjective suspension and affective calm they derive from machine play.”

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#addiction #class disintegration #gambling #the walking dead #trumpism #republican fascists

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