When I was young, just got out of college, I had to buy auto insurance. I had a beat-up old car. And I won’t name the name of the insurance company, but there was a company — let’s call it Acme Insurance in Illinois. And I was paying my premiums every month. After about six months I got rear-ended and I called up Acme and said, I’d like to see if I can get my car repaired, and they laughed at me over the phone because really this was set up not to actually provide insurance; what it was set up was to meet the legal requirements. But it really wasn’t serious insurance.
Now, it’s one thing if you’ve got an old beat-up car that you can’t get fixed. It’s another thing if your kid is sick, or you’ve got breast cancer.
The president is an idiot. Since he had just gotten out of college, he was a lawyer. One would guess that any competent lawyer would know the difference between liability insurance and collision insurance. One would also assume that an attorney would know that being rear-ended means that the person doing the rear-ending is liable and should pay for repairs.
This quote, and his story, illustrates the problem with government mandated insurance- the companies will offer the minimum amount of coverage under the law, whether it is worth a crap or not, and many people who can't afford the good coverage will buy that minimum coverage. Of course, the insurance the president really wants to mandate would not be able to refuse you for a preexisting condition, meaning that you will not have to buy insurance to fix your car until AFTER you have an accident. How anyone thinks the insurance companies will be able to stay in business under those conditions is beyond me.
I am still undecided as to whether any human being can be as stupid and naive as Obama is, or of this is a deliberate attempt to destroy the country.
I think that the press hurts him. They let him get away with such a string of howlers that he thinks he can talk his way out of anything.
ReplyDeleteYou said "Since he had just gotten out of college, he was a lawyer." I think he would have said the had "just gotten out of law school" in that case, probably he was referring to being a 22 year old who had just finished his undergraduate work. "college" and "law school" are different creatures.
ReplyDeleteMark:
ReplyDeleteObama didn't live in Chicago after college, he lived in New York. He didn't move to Chicago until two years later.
Even so, a 24 year old man with a college degree in Political Science is too stupid to know how insurance works? Or are we simply making excuses for him? Would you have let GW Bush get away with such a clueless statement?
Divemedic:
ReplyDeleteWhat the truth of the matter is I don't know, but I can tell a reasonable story about how someone who grew up and went to school in a dense urban area might not have understood the practical aspects of car ownership especially if during college they had never had to worry about such things (e.g. got rides from friends). I've known a couple of folks who never had a car during any of their college.
and that makes the fact that he is bringing this up now OK?
ReplyDeleteHe should know better by now, don't you think? The speech that is the subject of his post was not made when he was 22, or when he was 26. It was made last week.
Waiting for your next excuse...
It's not that he's stupid. In fact, I don't think he is. It's that he thinks we're stupid, too stupid to be able to fact check him. He also knows that the Lame Stream Media won't fact check him.
ReplyDeleteJust as with Joe Biden's claim about Roosevelt going on TV in the early 1930s to explain the depression, or Hillary Clinton's claim that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary, they think that the voters will just take them at face value.
The problem is, too many do.