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| Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune |
Republicans have a principled, bedrock opposition to universal healthcare. They viscerally resent the idea of providing care to people who can’t access it because they think that would mean rewarding slothful and gluttonous people who refuse to take care of themselves. If you have, say, severe OCD and did nothing to deserve it…sorry. They believe that healthcare is a consumer commodity that must be earned by remunerative work and good lifestyle decisions. It just viscerally rankles them to provide coverage to the uninsured.
And it goes beyond their angry and cranky fixation on personal responsibility. (“If you want something, work for it!”) Most American conservatives take deep pride in the fact that the United States does not have a universal healthcare system like the programs that people in every other advanced industrialized country, especially Western Europe, take for granted. They see it as American Exceptionalism, a tribute to the country’s pioneer legacy of individual freedom. “Barack Obama wants to make us more like the rest of the world,” complained Marco Rubio. Cutting your medications and giving blood to make the money you need for a doctor’s appointment are the American way.
That seems fair. How Jones characterizes the GOP matches what I consistently hear from trolling conservatives on WataugaWatch -- the ones who express a cold-blooded meanness about class and race. That's become standard rhetoric under the pall of Trump. It's possibly quite lethal for their future prospects. If Jones's conclusion is right, then there really may be such a thing as a suicide impulse, powerful and irresistible. Failing to extend Obamacare subsidies will have immeasurable impact on the prospects of Republican rule going forward:
...I do not think Republicans are likely to, after 15 years of bitter and often histrionic opposition, give a man -- some of their constituents accused of being the Anti-Christ -- the satisfaction of seeing the core of his greatest accomplishment survive another Republican majority.
If he's right, well then, they're cooked.
2 comments:
By 'Universal Healthcare' you mean government run healthcare.
1. When has the government ever run anything efficiently?
2 Do you want TRUMP controlling your healthcare?
Even with ObamaCare American medicine has become a predatory arena for business exploitation. Take for instance the Medicaid and assisted living predators who are not only parasitic criminals but also lobbyists and even office holders. It's parallel to the MICIMATT (Department of War and allied contractors, plus institutional supporters). And now housing has taken the same turn with extractive insurance schemes and the proposal of 50 year mortgages. Trumpism has made the EPA a Department of Environmental Despoilation. (When the goal is Extraction best appoint an incompetent
leadership.) The Frontier ended back in Teddy Roosevelt's day, so that for survival government coordination/adjudication became necessary. We are at such a low point that farming is depending on speculators for water and higher education is a hollow racket. A cataclysm might provide a reset, except that we lack
a fallback position. Universal health coverage could buy some time, except that
denial of care has become an industry unto itself.
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