Richard Mack

Richard Mack

Former Arizona county sheriff Richard Mack, a fierce opponent of Obamacare and a leader in the "constitutional sheriff" movement, is struggling to pay his medical bills after he and his wife each faced serious illnesses. The former sheriff and his wife do not have health insurance and started a GoFundMe campaign to solicit donations from family and friends to cover the costs of their medical care. […] "The States do not have to take or support or pay for Obamacare or anything else from Washington DC. The States are not subject to federal direction," he wrote on his website, outlining how state governments can block President Obama.

"Since it appears that recovery will take a good deal of time with associated expenses, I struggle to not feel stress—both the stress of thinking about huge hospital and other medical bills as well as regular living expenses while I am unable to work—and also the stress of not being able to accomplish what I am so passionate about doing for others," Mack wrote in a note on his GoFundMe page. "It is difficult and humbling to say that we need your help, but we do."

Ah, life That was Mack then. This is Mack now.Because I am a human being, I hope that Mack and his wife recover. Hell, I even hope they find enough like-minded people willing to spend their own money to help them in their time of great need. Because being a human being should mean believing that we should help one another. One way of doing that, I'd gently point out to Mack, is to join with the rest of society in buying health insurance, which creates great big pools of people paying into a system that takes care of everyone.

It's fine if Mack wants to skip that whole insurance thing, and it's fine if his followers help it him out now. It's not fine that Mack wants everyone else in the country to be put in the same untenable, horrible, crippling situation of having both poor health and overwhelming medical bills. It would be nice to think that this foray in the real world might change Mack's mind about Obamacare, but I'm not holding my breath.

