WASHINGTON—Seeking to open his mind to new possibilities for overhauling the U.S. healthcare system, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) reportedly witnessed an infinite number of replacement plans Wednesday after dropping acid to inspire ideas for an Obamacare alternative.
Shortly after the 75-year-old Republican senator ingested two 100-microgram tabs of LSD in his Congressional office, sources said countless substitutes for the Affordable Care Act began to explode before his eyes in luminescent, hyper-vivid colors and patterns.
“Oh my God—I can see the CHIP provisions spreading out in every direction forever and ever and ever,” said a reeling McConnell, gazing wide-eyed as infinite, interlocking fractal combinations of health savings plans, employer-provided coverage, and government subsidies enveloped him in an accelerating stream, eventually passing over him with such velocity that they appeared to be an entire galaxy of stars swirling around him. “Now I can see…I can see the outpatient hospital visits covered for every child in the country! No, every child who’s ever been born, and will ever be born! Even the ones who haven’t yet been conceived!”
“The scope of coverage is so beautiful,” added the senator quietly. “Whoa.”
According to sources, McConnell’s hallucinations came on slowly, first appearing as a geodesic block grant spiraling gently in the center of the senator’s desk before morphing into a gigantic, prismatic spiderweb of plans whose out-of-pocket prescription expenses expanded and contracted with McConnell’s every breath.
McConnell then reportedly turned his attention to the pulsating, roiling carpet in his offices, from which an entire ancient forest sprang as though from the beginning of time, its vines and verdant, leafy canopy composed of untaxed dollars that reached to the ceiling, beneath which the senator said the “whole country would be protected,” eliminating penalties and subsidizing care for 150 million eligible Americans.
“Every co-pay is connected to every patient is connected to every beating human heart,” said McConnell as he began to peel off his suit and tie until he was completely nude. “The individual mandate is total bullshit, because the plan is life itself, and you can’t opt in or out of life. And the continuous coverage incentive—well, it’s fucking this! All of this! The river and the sky and the grass and the trees. And it’s you! You and me. We’re all part of the plan.”
“Fuck, I’m tripping balls,” added McConnell, waving his hands in front of his face and attempting to grasp at the low-cost, high-value brackets that had presented themselves as glowing orbs.
McConnell reportedly grew terrified, however, after claiming to see the skies darken and a huge wall of 400-foot-high premiums rising in the distance while thousands of jagged, ugly shapes representing an overburdened Medicaid system rained down around him, threatening to crush the middle class and, eventually, the whole human race.
The senator then fled his office on foot and sprinted into the Capitol rotunda, where sources said he stopped dead in his tracks to stare open-mouthed at the domed ceiling for the next 90 minutes, mumbling in horror about an upper limit on the tax preference for employer plans before the naked and sweating congressman ran out onto the National Mall.
Sources later told reporters that at one point, the senior senator from Kentucky caught sight of his own face in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and began to panic, insisting that he saw himself waiting in an out-of-network doctor’s office for 10,000 years due to his own proposed legislation before decaying completely, his flesh falling from his bones in rotting chunks.
“He was really freaking out, so I brought him a glass of orange juice and that seemed to calm him down a bit,” said aide James Scholtz, adding that McConnell became fixated on Scholtz’s striped tie and rubbed it gently on his face while repeatedly stating that he no longer feared the massive impact to the federal budget that sweeping healthcare reform would bring—that he in fact welcomed it. “I couldn’t really follow everything he was saying, but he was pretty adamant that his body was an HMO, Earth was the network, the universe was the insurance company, and God was the free-market exchange. Eventually he started crying, so I just patted his hand until [Secretary of Transportation] Mrs. Chao came to talk to him.”
After the drug’s effects had worn off, Senator McConnell reportedly surveyed his notes, called them “nonsense,” and then picked himself up from the K Street alley where he had found himself, ready to move ahead with his plan to repeal Obamacare without a replacement.
