Pull the ladder up boys, I got mine!

This blog is not a political mouthpiece for me, but let me say this. I hate political ads. They are nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt to get voters to make emotional, instead of informed, decisions at the polls.

Sometimes they don't even do a good job of piecing together an emotional argument. Take the latest ad from Minnesota U.S. Senatorial candidate Mike McFadden.




First, watch the video (message fail, Vimeo, did YouTube cease being a thing?):



Stitches from Mike McFadden on Vimeo.


The crux of the ad is that McFadden is so cheap, he didn't want to pay for his son to get his stitches removed properly. Due to his cheapness he is going to go to Washington and make cuts to Obamacare (real name, 'Affordable Care Act', ACA).

This brings us to the biggest message fail, lack of logical consistency. Apparently, healthcare was so frustratingly expensive when he needed to provide it for his son, a program who's mandate is to make healthcare affordable to more citizens needs to be cut.

Let's look at his amusing anecdote for a second: Removing the stitches was annoyingly expensive at $100. The stitches were removed ~10 years ago, based on Conor being a senior football player at Stanford and the stitches being removed when he was 10.

In the past, pre-ACA decade, average healthcare costs have basically doubled. Making the $100 then $200 today. We can assume the family had health insurance since last I checked, a healthcare provider won't even look in my general direction for $200.

Costs have risen on average under the ACA. But the numbers of the uninsured have dropped (with 4% of Americans getting health insurance for the first time).

Additionally, his argument ignores that the government has already spent billions implementing the program (although the cost was billions less than projected). When have you ever seen a cheap person throw something expensive in the trash when there is even the remotest possibility to fix it?

So, the message of the ad is, healthcare was too expensive (for me, a cheap, but insured person), healthcare is even more expensive now (for me, a cheap, but insured person), I'm going to cut the program that has contributed (but didn't cause, remember, prices were going up before) to price increases for me, a cheap, but insured person despite the fact it has made the prices I paid available to people that have never had access to them before.