Be sure to wave at the surveillance aerostats[1] in Maryland as you head that way.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2015/10/28...

You make the category error of thinking this is about privacy.

It's about control.

It's about neither. It's about money. Insurers would love to be able to increase premiums based on pre-existing conditions and all the pre-emptive language of this bill notwithstanding this is opening the door a crack. And once the door is open it won't stop opening further. After all, if you don't want to cooperate with the 'voluntary' wellness program it's your own fault that your premiums will go up. After all, non-cooperation is a sure sign there is something you know that you don't want them to know (or so the argument will go...).

Wellness, what a nice example of newspeak.

It looks like it is going to unravel, but the trajectory between 2000 and 2015 was that US insurance companies had to consider less and less information when pricing policies.

I think it is hard to extrapolate that into a guaranteed bleak future.

Less information -> more fairness. The bleak future isn't there when it does not affect you but for people with pre-existing conditions (and that's a fair number) it just got a little bleaker. (Because having some life-long health issue is already bleak enough by my reckoning and such people should be aided rather than hindered in having an otherwise as normal life as possible. It's a lottery, no point in penalizing the losers even further.)

Yes, that's what I meant. The medium term trajectory has been towards a fairer system. A bill passing out of a committee now doesn't guarantee things will be worse in 2030.

Even if the ACA is completely repealed it's hard to say where things will be in 8 years, never mind the forever.

That's true, but in the intermediary it will make peoples lives worse, possibly much worse.

Why bother? What's a march going to accomplish? If we were worried about this stuff, we should have spoken up in November, but we didn't. We voted for the GOP to have strong control of both houses of Congress. All a march does is show that there's an angry minority of voters who lost the election. The GOP politicians in Congress know that these disgruntled people are not the ones who voted for them, so they really don't care about your opinions.

And as for removing both Dems and Reps, how do you proposed to do that? They, together, control the whole government.

It'll accomplish a hell of a lot more than doing nothing. If they won't respond to peaceful protest then they can be removed by other means.

Like what? The only option at that point is violent revolution. Good luck with that. Besides, the Trump supporters are the ones with guns.

Oh you Americans, always jumping right down the slippery slope. There's a whole spectrum of strikes and civil disobedience between here and there. And no, the Trump supporters are not the only ones with guns, even though they have been gearing up for civil war for longer.

Civil disobedience requires a large amount of cooperation from many people to be effective. Good luck with that. The anti-Trump side couldn't even be bothered to show up to vote against him (for anyone; there were more choices than Hillary on the ballot, and there's all the Congressional and other positions too). If they couldn't be bothered to cast a ballot, you really think they're going to be bothered to risk their freedom and jail time on civil disobedience demonstrations? Hah!

The only people with guns in any substantial numbers are the Trump supporters, the anti-Trump conservative Republican voters, and maybe a few violent radical leftists. The only ones there who are going to take a real stand against the government are the last ones, and they're 1) too few to make a real change, and 2) not people you want to side with anyway--people like Timothy McVeigh. In case you've forgotten, almost all the people on the left are anti-gun and consistently support anti-gun legislation. They're not going to be stockpiling arms and ammo. The ones who have are either happy with the current situation (Trump supporters), or somewhat unhappy but confident they'll be able to get politicians they prefer elected in the next election or two since they've already succeeded in getting many in Congress now ("mainstream" conservative GOP voters). It's only the leftists, liberals, progressives, etc. who are hopping mad, and they generally don't believe in gun ownership and certainly don't believe in civil war.