To justify Medicaid cuts, House Speaker Mike Johnson says the healthcare program leads to "able-bodied young men" playing videogames instead of working.
People are checking out because the middle class is non-existent. It doesn’t matter how hard you work - the the prospect of getting ahead, owning a home, retirement is out of reach for the vast majority of people.
People can work hard and stress themselves out or they can check out of the system and achieve largely the same result.
This is about the failures of late stage capitalism. To claim the issue is free healthcare is gaslighting.
Where are they getting the money for the games? Those are expensive as shit, I’m still making do with games I bought decades ago because I can’t afford new ones.
How are they eating? Food is fucking expensive, are they getting free food as well?
How are they paying rent? Have to have a roof over your head and electricity in your walls to play video games all day.
This mother fucker thinks all guys are like his son, lazy mother fuckers mooching off their parents. What a dumb, ignorant moron.
Become a congressperson, they get Medicare for life just like every other citizen should have but don't because Congress will grant it to themselves but not everyone else. If it's good enough for them it should be good enough to cover us.
Free healthcare doesn't pay rent or utilities. I would love to stay at home and play video games regardless of my healthcare status, but I simply couldn't afford to.
The amount of dirty looks I got today casually playing slay the spire on my steam deck as a 41 year old man in the waiting room of a medical facility was pretty impressive.
Sure. Let's just pretend video games are free. And so is healthcare. Also, how much health care does he think young people use? This is a stupid argument.
Didn't you know sex is bad? It's absolutely reprehensible and the only allowable exception is for the purposes of procreation, where you are allowed only to use the missionary position and your lawfully wedded wife is to be completely obscured by a blanket covering her entire body apart from a small hole in her crotch area. You can not look down or touch her body with your hands at any point, you should be reciting prayer the entire time and preferably keep one hand on the Bible during the whole process.
All other ways to engage with sexual acts and sexuality are unnatural, ungodly and frankly disgusting.
Pretty rich coming from a guy who lets trump take every power congress is supposed to hold. WTF does he even do at work? If we stopped paying him, would anything at all happen? Every republican seems like a whiny crybullying grifter to me.
Young men who are capable of playing video games all day are likely depressed, and have a clinical problem. Our volition to be productive was demonstrated during the 2020 lockdown and the great resignation of 2021-22, in which young men (as with all other working demographics) learned:
They felt better in a non-toxic work environment
They couldn't couch potato for more than a week without getting fierce cabin fever, and
They got highly skilled when they were doing a thing they liked.
The ones who resigned from old jobs were the ones who were able to monetize their hobby enough to quit. Many more got productive, but didn't find something in their craft for which there was a ready market.
Speaker Johnson is a fierce MAGA and conforms to the common fascist trope of never speaking in good faith. See Sartre's antisemite quote.
With several perspectives including that crunch remains a thing in AAA game development, our ownership class and CEOs are less concerned about maximizing profits than they are being lords with a feif and peons (compulsory servitude).
Oh and death to all monarchists. Disney deaths preferred.
I would prefer to work a job than to grind in a videogame. Unfortunately, Americans live in a nation where bad working conditions, low pay, heavy competition, instability, and ghost jobs makes job seeking unpalatable.
Putting aside the, "Everyone but an idiot knows the poor must be kept poor, or they will never be productive" logic, it's also just dumb as shit to claim that "able-bodied young men" are going to be super motivated to get off the couch for the sake of health insurance - not even real healthcare, we're talking about paying hundreds of dollars a month so that if you get sick you can "only" be saddled with a very high deductible.
I fucking hate these people's guts. Something something Luigi's Mansion.
"No one has talked about cutting one benefit in Medicaid to anyone who's duly owed—what we've talked about is returning work requirements, so, for example, you don't have able-bodied young men on a program that's designed for single mothers and the elderly and disabled. They're draining resources from people,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson last week.
'Get fucked poors, sucks to suck when working full time still keeps you below the poverty line. Can't afford to pay for you lazy fucks to see a doctor when we've got rich people who need the money more'
Hey look, an "elite" with absolutely no concept of how actual reality works, who's just trying to stir up a base consisting of people with IQs smaller than their shoe size.
I promise you, if I could stay home all day and play video games by somehow using free healthcare, I'd be doing it.
Dunno if it is satire, i honestly am struggling to tell these days, but there's a post that says this fucker routinely plays surgeon simulator while attending meetings....on twitch
this dude and his son monitor each other's devices to make sure they don't consume porn. i don't think he should be allowed to talk about literally anyone else's habits.
No job, grind away the entire waking day with a low paying zero hours contract while filing job applications, No videogames, no relaxation, more stress, costs healthcare providers more
No job, spend some of the day working while filing job applications, Yes Videogames, relaxation, lower stress, costs healthcare providers less
Yet another case where if the politician seriously thought about the issue for just half a minute they'd realise their attitude makes no sense.
Oh, he knows he’s completely full of shit. If you keep that in mind, his attitude makes perfect sense. Make up whatever bullshit he can to fake a justification to enrich his wealthy daddies.
Imagine living in a country that has turn to shit so long ago that you can't believe that it is possible for people can be motivated to work without resorting to the constant threat of being left to die if they don't.
If you choose to pay this way, you will no longer be given upfront prices on the steam store and several months or years later you will receive a bill from a debt collector to finally pay for your game. And it's going to be a lot more than you thought.
Why is this specific to men? Are women not able to take advantage of these same programs? Are men having job placement issues where women are not?
What is the root cause of this? Since jobs and people have both existed for a looooooong time, I doubt this latest generation was just born lazy. What's the behind the scenes info here?
Ah, then the “free” healthcare is the healthcare they get because their parents pay for it. Covering kids is far from free. But it taps in to any rage parents may feel having to cover their kids even if they always argue with their kids. A lie that his base is happy to hear.
It's not like they believe healthcare is inherently demotivating, it's that they're already Red Team members, and "Healthcare and welfare breed moochers" is a Red Team belief, and since they're good Red Team members, they synthesize it into their belief system--despite the fact functionally no one rips off the healthcare system because, frankly, you have to have some kind of pathology to visit a doctor enough for fraud to be an issue.
I mean "Oh noes, they're ripping off the healthcare systems by.. (checks notes) ..getting antibiotics for their earache!!" is not a thing. Ever.
Everyone, even in countries with socialized medicine, avoids interactions with the healthcare system until they need to. I mean, do you you really want to recreationally get your throat swabbed? I'm sure there's four people on this planet of nine billion who get off on that, but that's it.
Now, rich people, they come to this believe authentically. They hate public healthcare because a) they have to pay for it, and b) it's one less piece of leverage they have to keep people shackled to work. But make no mistake, they also suffer from the delusion, above.
The answer is about half of them do and the other half don't and are there to fleece the first half. You see the same pattern with priests, where some of them are true believers and the rest are just there to devour the flock.
In a crowd of 200 people, you are nearly guaranteed to have a sociopath without any kind of conscience. These people are more or less like sharks and move around and devour those around them without a second thought. It's a shame, because they are often the limiting factor to scaling any kind of human organization.
So many of the rules and restrictions we have today are due to these people, and sadly, it's just part of the human condition.
Mike Johnson says the healthcare program leads to "able-bodied young men" playing videogames instead of working
Everyone else has already pointed out the obvious point that free healthcare does not exist here, but you've at least gotta give it to him that this is a reasonable conclusion to draw given that "able-bodied young men" would surely be the least likely among us to get by without access to healthcare.
I dunno. I'd be a lot more apt to go seek a job if the market for my desired career and skills wasn't currently being recklessly trashed. No point in taking a job offer knowing I'll be the new guy and the first to get let go when the inevitable cuts come due to government cutbacks, tariff damage, and a recession leading to more reductions. It's way easier to stay home and let the government, who carelessly took away my job, pay for me to play video games all day.
Just a normal US politician. They lost all connection to reality ages ago. Take his ID papers away and let him survive on minimum wage jobs somewhere where nobody knows his sorry face.