John Stossel: Women Are Hypochondriacs, Should Pay More for Healthcare

The fleshy casing for a sentient mustache that calls itself John Stossel offered up some brilliant social commentary on Fox & Friends this morning. In yet another fucking segment on conservative Obamacare fee-fees (because the segments will not stop until every conservative has been interviewed individually!), Stossel lambasted President Obama for suggesting that women shouldn’t have to pay more for health care.

Via RawStory:

“Women go to the doctor much more often than men! Maybe they’re smarter or maybe they’re hypochondriacs,” Stossel continued. “They live longer. Who knows? But if it’s insurance, you ought to be able to charge people who use the services more, more.”

GREAT POINT, JOHN STOSSEL. Women should be penalized for utilizing a service they pay for! Like, yo, it’s not my fault you don’t go to the fucking doctor. Feel free! Maybe a surgeon can do something about how there’s a mouth where your anus is supposed to be.

But let me think…hmm…is there possibly some thing that’s really expensive…that requires repeat follow-up care…and only affects female-bodied people… (I mean besides being a bitch. Up top!)

Oh yeah! THAT THING WHERE HUMANS COME FROM.

Ugh, women are such hypochondriacs. Walk it off, ladies.

But of course Stossel and F&F host Steve Doocy have a counter-argument in the bag already. Women should pay more for babies because women are baby machines.

“But, John, you’re not paying attention,” Doocy said sarcastically. “This administration, this president wants to make everything fair. It’s not fair if you pay less than she does… And as a number of Republicans have made the argument, why should I pay for — I’m in my 60s, why should I pay for your maternity coverage?”

“Or why should women pay for men’s Viagra?” Stossel asked. “This mandating all this stuff it has to cover just takes away consumer choice.”

Despite what Doocy’s “middle-aged doofus sociopath defense” would have you believe, the cost associated with giving birth is not a woman’s cost. It is a shared responsibility. In almost all cases, a man helped get a baby in there, so a man should help get that baby out. It’s only our twisted system that puts that cost on the woman’s bill—like you guys ordered a goddamn poutine “for the table” and then ducked out just before the check came. Oh, no, no problem, guys. We’ll get it. And we’ll walk home.

More importantly, though, whether maternity care is what drives up the cost of women’s heath care or not, this entire line of thinking is irrelevant. Because THAT’S WHAT INSURANCE IS FOR. Do you know how much I want to pay for your Viagra? Sooooooooo much! I am so happy to pay for that for you! I want to pay for your penis pills, your back surgery, your kidney transplant, and your deep vein thrombosis. I want to pay for your preexisting conditions, your congenital heart defects, and health problems you brought on yourself through recklessness or unhealthy habits. I want to pay for it all. Because some day, when I need it, I want to have insurance that pays for me and my kids and my parents and my friends and people all over the country I’ve never even met, but whom I care about because they are human beings.

I know you’re only pretending to not understand this, John Stossel, but let me try again in the simplest terms. If you’re at a party and somebody starts to die, the other people at the party try to stop that person from dying. That’s what we do. But somehow, when you blow that impulse up and codify it on a large scale, it’s an unnatural abomination? Shut uuuuuuup, dude.

Our society pays for the welfare of our society, to benefit the health and well-being of our society, because it is better for our society. I don’t let you die if you don’t let me die. If you take that structure away, if everyone only pays for the things they actually use and can afford, then guess what? ONLY RICH PEOPLE CAN AFFORD TO BE SICK.