“Elections have consequences,” outgoing US president Barack Obama once told Republican congressional leaders, and “I won.” He was right. One consequence of the 2016 election, in which the Republican Party maintained its House and Senate majorities and got a president of their own party, is the near-certain, near-future repeal of the Affordable Care Act, aka “ObamaCare.”

What will replace ObamaCare? That’s far less clear, but president-elect Donald Trump, in a January 14 interview with the New York Times, promises “insurance for everybody … in a much simplified form — much less expensive and much better.”

I doubt it. The Republican replacement for ObamaCare will likely have little to do with insurance. On the healthcare front, very few Americans have had “insurance” for decades. What they’ve had, especially since the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, is “pre-paid health care.” Here’s the difference:

Insurance is what’s called a “hedged bet” — a bet you’ll likely “lose,” and would prefer to, but that protects you against major costs if you “win.”

With car insurance, you bet a little each month (your premium) so that if you get in a wreck (that is, if you “win”), your liabilities (and with full coverage your own losses) are covered. You don’t want to get into a wreck. You probably won’t get in a wreck. But if you do, it’s going to be expensive. Better to pay a little out of pocket each month on that hedged bet, just in case.

Real health insurance works the same way. You pay a little each month to protect yourself from the costs of catastrophic illness or injury. You don’t expect the insurance company to provide for your every need, pay part or all of the cost of every office call for the flu, etc. Insurance only comes into play if you have a heart attack, get hit by a truck, or come down with cancer.

Modern (especially post-1973) “health coverage” isn’t insurance. It’s a program through which you pre-pay (or your employer or the government pre-pays) on a monthly basis to have all your health needs at least partially covered.

Obviously this is going to be more expensive than real insurance, especially when the law requires companies to provide coverage for pre-existing conditions, pay for optional/preventative pharmaceuticals that customers might not even want, etc. And since consumers are paying for an all you can eat buffet, demand for  care is going to constantly increase, pushing prices up and up and up.

If the Republican replacement for ObamaCare is just another pre-paid healthcare scheme, and especially if it includes the “individual mandate” requiring everyone to buy in,  they might as well not bother. Healthcare won’t be affordable again until government gets out of the way.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

• “A Reminder: What Insurance Is,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Winnemucca, Nevada News4Nevada, 01/16/17
• “A Reminder: What Insurance Is,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County Citizens Journal, 01/17/17
• “What Insurance Is,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Columbia, South Carolina Panorama, 01/19/17
• “A Reminder: What Insurance Is,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Key West: The Newspaper [Florida], 01/20/17
• “We need real health insurance,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Pasco/Pinellas Suncoast News, 01/26/17
• “A Reminder: What Insurance Is,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Carroll County, Maryland Standard,  03/23/17

Actors, in a word, act. They don’t play themselves. They portray other people.

Bryan Cranston is not really a dentist (Seinfeld) or a chemist who makes methamphetamine (Breaking Bad). Christina Hendricks is not  really a con artist in space (Firefly) or the office manager of an advertising firm in the 1960s (Mad Men). They’re actors. They act.

Joseph Fiennes acts, too. He’s not really Michael Jackson. He’s just an actor who plays Michael Jackson in an episode of  the British comedy show Urban Myths. That episode was pulled from play by Sky TV after much-publicized outrage (from, among others, the late pop star’s family) over a white actor playing a black character.

The cast of the Broadway musical Hamilton aren’t really heroes of the American Revolution and founders of the United States. They’re just a bunch of black actors playing a bunch of white characters. They’ve enjoyed popular success and critical acclaim for doing so.

One of these things is not like the others.

One of these things is not like the dream of the man whose namesake holiday Americans celebrate on the third Monday of each January.

That dream:  “[T]hat my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

No one doubts that Fiennes is a master of his craft. He’s performed as a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He’s won the  Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role. IMdb credits him with 37 film and television roles and single turns as director and producer. He’s appeared on screens big and small as a Soviet commissar, a Catholic clergyman, Merlin, and of course as Shakespeare himself.

But for some reason casting him as an African-American musician is beyond the pale.

Michael Jackson’s daughter tweets that she’s “incredibly offended” and that it makes her “want to vomit.”

Jackson’s nephew refers to the casting decision as “blatant disrespect.”

Fiennes isn’t being judged on his acting skills, on whether or not he captures the essence of Michael Jackson’s personality and successfully conveys that essence to viewers. He’s  being judged on the color of his skin, and the show’s creators are being judged on their decision to ignore his skin color.

Racism, by any other name (to butcher Juliet’s line), is just as repugnant.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

• “The Jackson Family versus Martin Luther King and the Cast of Hamilton,” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 01/16/17
• “The Jackson family versus Martin Luther King and the cast of Hamilton,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Montgomery, West Virginia Herald, 01/18/17

Every time the market value of Bitcoin drops as measured by its exchange value against government fiat currencies, the same people who declared it dead last time, and the time before that, come out of the woodwork to declare it dead again.

The world’s most popular cryptocurrency, which just celebrated its eighth birthday, once again finds itself surrounded by priests offering it last rites and callers asking the Make-a-Wish Foundation to offer it a trip to Disney.  Its price took a precipitous 10% fall after the Chinese central bank announced “inspections” of the country’s “Bitcoin-related businesses.”

As usual, Bitcoin naysayers are missing the forest for the trees. Why is the Chinese regime attacking Bitcoin? Because they’re afraid of it. And they should be. Chinese investors are moving capital out of the country’s fiat currency, the renminbi/yuan, and out of sight of — which means beyond the control of — the People’s Bank of China.

Governments aren’t going after Bitcoin because it’s bad. They’re going after it because it’s good. It threatens their monopoly on money, not to mention their ability to tax.

Yes, Bitcoin prices remain volatile. That’s unsurprising. As I write this, all the Bitcoin in the world, if sold at once at the current price, would bring in about $12.5 billion. That may sound like a lot, but it really isn’t.

One single corporation, Apple, is about 50 times the size of the Bitcoin marketplace, with a current market capitalization of $633 billion. When Apple’s market cap fell, quickly and by more than 10%, at the end of 2015 and again last April, I don’t remember anyone declaring Apple dead.

When the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by nearly 30% in October and November of 2008 people were certainly worried, but not many considered it a sign that America’s economy was on its deathbed.

As with the Dow and as with Apple, a few big players can certainly rock the Bitcoin boat. But rocking that boat and sinking it aren’t the same thing.

One way in which Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies can reduce their own volatility while increasing their exchange value is by reducing the ability of nation-states to be among those big boat-rocking players.

Over the last few years there’s been ongoing and often fiery debate among cryptocurrency creators, users and advocates as to whether or not they should willingly subject themselves to government regulation and oversight.

As entities like the US Internal Revenue Service and the People’s Bank of China take increased interest in Bitcoin, those debates will presumably settle on the correct answer and the technology will follow suit.

That correct answer, in case you hadn’t guessed, is “no.” The more quickly and completely we separate money and state, the better off humanity will be.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION HISTORY

• “Bitcoin isn’t the corpse. It’s the undertaker.” by Thomas L. Knapp, Sonoran News [Arizona], 01/13/17
• “Bitcoin Isn’t The Corpse. It’s The Undertaker,” by Thomas L. Knapp, Ventura County, California Citizens Journal, 01/14/17
• “Bitcoin Isn’t The Corpse. It’s The Undertaker.” by Thomas L. Knapp, OpEdNews, 01/14/17
• “Separate money and state through Bitcoin” [web edition, 01/17/17]/“Seperating [sic] money and state with cryptocurrency” [print edition, p. 5], Indiana Daily Student