Next step, fake emergency rooms.

Next step, fake emergency rooms.

California Republicans are desperate and shameless. In the past two weeks, GOP Assembly members have sent mailings out on what appears to be the state's dime to their constituents about health insurance. Only, they don't direct those people to CoveredCA.com to sign up. Instead, they send them to their own astroturf version with the url CoveringHealthCareCA.com. On their version, there are links to negative articles and twisted messages intended to sour people on signing up for health insurance before they ever land at the official health exchange site.

If you click on the "Don't have health insurance" tab on the front page, you're taken to a page that puts all the focus on the penalty and none on the benefits. In fact, they have a "penalty calculator" on that page, rather than a premium calculator.

Republicans are horrible people. Period. A fake health care site. A fake health care site intended to discourage the people on their own mailing lists from getting health insurance because fuck them, that's why.Other bits of logic include explaining to young people that by getting insurance they'll be subsidizing sick people, the goddamn leeching bastards. (On the other hand, if you cannot grasp that the central point of all insurance is pooling a little money from a large group of people in order to insure some level of security for those people in the pool that have something very bad happen to them, including for example you, perhaps removing you from the gene pool is not entirely a bad thing. If you are so nasty a person that you can't live with the thought of insuring yourself because it means some other person might get healthcare using one one hundredth of a cent of your money, the world will certainly not be missing you much after you are gone. Godspeed!)

This is yet another of the reasons the current incarnation of the Republican Party is little more than a political oozing sore. There is probably a downside to trying to kill off your own voters to score a momentary political point, but let's just say the members of the party brain trust in my state could meet in a closet and still have enough room for the vacuum and boxes of Christmas decorations.