What the HAYnes? The Affordable Care game

HUMOR – As I write my first column for St George News I have two major concerns. I want this column to be good enough so that they will ask me to write another, while at the same time not wanting it to be so good that my good friend Mori “Newsmonkey” Kessler or my daughter Elise “Naturally Funny” Haynes think that I am bucking for their jobs.

All week long as I prepare to do the morning show with Marty Lane on 97.7 Big Classic Country, I check to see what is trending on Yahoo, Google, and Twitter … just to be sure our morning show keeps abreast of the issues that are of interest to the average Joe – or Josephine, as the case may be.

This past week a large number of people were Googling movie stars and searching Yahoo for the latest news on their favorite sports team. Sadly, for every 1,000 searches wanting to know what the Robertson family on Duck Dynasty is up to, there are less than 10 searches for the latest information about the Affordable Care Act or which government agency was the last to tap our phones.

(Note to reader: I often make up a statistic to prove a point as it saves me vast amounts of time searching the internet for the exact study to best prove my point.)

This presents a major problem for me as I love to keep abreast of the latest news and seldom worry about which rehab center Lindsay Lohan is checking into or what is the dumbest thing that Justin Beiber did today.

Happily I have found a topic to write about today that should be of great interest to everyone, and that is … what in the world is going on with the Monopoly game? After 70 years of being able to play Monopoly as the “Iron” token, the iron token has been replaced by a cat token! I for one am outraged! A CAT???

And if that isn’t bad enough, the makers of Monopoly have come out with a Monopoly-like game called Monopoly Empire which the makers themselves say is tailor-made for the shorter attention spans of the youth of today … Not to mention they have eliminated going to jail because the concept of going to jail seems to slow things down too much for today’s kids.

That is why I am interested in marketing a new game called the “Affordable Care” game. If this game catches on I could be making billions come January. Here is how the new game works.

Let me start by saying that it is very unlikely that people will read the rules before playing the game as the rule book is thousands of pages long. This is to ensure confusion as the game begins to be played. Besides, if people knew how the game was played who on earth would want to play it!

The game can be played by up to millions of players, but the very people who invented the game say they have no interest in playing. For some reason Internal Revenue Service workers didn’t want to play either but are being forced to play by their big brother.

Unlike Monopoly, the game of Affordable Care doesn’t use pretend money but instead uses money printed by the United States Treasury. What am I thinking? … the game of Affordable Care IS played using pretend money.

Once everyone is sitting at the table to play Affordable Care everyone is issued a different amount of money to play the game with. Then, at the start of the game everyone is expected to go out and find health insurance at the lowest possible price.

Even before the game begins many large groups of people will say that while they support the maker of the game, they want to be exempted from playing as well … go figure!

The closer it gets to the actual game being played, the more people will whine about some aspect of the game. This is because, as the players discover the real object of the game, they don’t see any way of winning. Instead they will just go around and around the board paying for the fun of playing.

At first I thought it would be fun to play the game, but the more I look into the rules the more I want to be exempted from play as well. The problem is that there is now a FINE for not playing.

This game is getting to be less fun on a day-to-day basis. I think I’ll go find out what rehab Lindsey checked into this week.

 

John Carter is temporarily stepping in for his daughter, Elise Haynes, as she deals with the wonders and glories of moving. Carter is a well known radio personality who co-hosts the morning show with Marty Lane on 97.7 Big Classic Country (our sympathies to Marty Lane).  He is also known to throw on a good ole country-western dance party and is far too easily amused by lousy George Takai impersonations.

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Copyright St. George News, SaintGeorgeUtah.com LLC, 2013, all rights reserved.

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8 Comments

  • Kent Lee September 28, 2013 at 8:57 am

    Ignorance is bliss

  • My Evil Twin September 28, 2013 at 11:41 am

    I cannot tell you how thankful I am for this article. Because it tells me where I can now here Marty LANE and for a time anyway, John Carter!
    It is good to know there is some CW on the air that has nothing to do with stuffed shirt, overblown ego Carl Lamar and Phoney Bologna KONY!

  • Matthew Staker September 28, 2013 at 12:21 pm

    It doesn’t matter if they are exempt or not, they are going to be paying for it with our money. Do you get an annual pay increase or get to tell your employer when you get a raise? I don’t. If the cost is too high for them and their staff, they will simply give themselves a ‘cost of living’ raise which we will pay for them.

  • John Carter September 28, 2013 at 3:20 pm

    @ Kent Lee: I said they didn’t want to play not that they were not playing… A fact that can be easily substantiated. The only reason they are playing now is because not playing would be the kiss of death politically. Note: People who read poorly are only marginally better off than people who can’t read at all!

  • truthseeker September 29, 2013 at 2:32 am

    To Kent, there has been multiple proposed bills that congress has exempted themselves from.

  • truthseeker September 29, 2013 at 2:35 am

    Also, there are many companies and unions that are exempt from obamacare.

  • Mike Hobson September 29, 2013 at 10:53 am

    Please bring attention to local matters. Your new superintendent is asking for a raise in property taxes!!!! This has to be stopped. Please pay attention to local matters. He wants to tax us out of 185 million for another high school that we do not need. Please vote no on prop 9 in November. We cannot afford more taxes in southern Utah!

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