The knot.

I've spent the day sorting through the wreckage written into the Republicans' long-promised, deceptively packaged "American Health Care Act," reading one back-of-the-envelope analysis after another. According to one report, six to 10 million people will lose coverage. Twenty-eight million live -- or don't -- without coverage today. This bill gives the appearance of a replacement, but makes meaningless the familiar terminology -- tax credits and cost-sharing subsidies, coverage for people with pre-existing conditions -- or promises to give states more power over Medicaid, a clever mask for deep cuts. The people who need healthcare 

the most -- the poor, those who live with disabilities and chronic illnesses -- will be locked out. The rich will get tax cuts: blood money. What a price to pay.

I fundamentally cannot wrap my mind around the people whose ideology finds ugly expression in this document. It's a knot I keep picking at, day after day, year after year, getting nowhere. Who can think this, want this, do this, and live with themselves? What stories are these people telling themselves? That the market is God and God decides who lives and dies? What mortal can constrain God? This is as close as I can get: a refusal of responsibility, a refusal to connect any action to its chain of consequences. What am I doing? I am freeing the market to enact its Divine will. It is not mine to question.