Tuesday, July 11, 2017

Unprecedented spite: The American carnage of the GOP health care bill

https://www.dailykos.com/story/2017/7/2/1676305/-Unprecedented-spite-The-American-carnage-of-the-GOP-health-care-bill#
"A calamity a wiser Donald Trump might call “American carnage”—22 million more uninsured Americans, millions more facing financial ruin, gutted essential health protections, skyrocketing premiums to maintain comparable coverage, jacked-up deductibles, spiraling out of pockets costs and over 200,000 needless deaths by 2026, all to fund an $600 billion tax cut windfall for the wealthy—Mitch McConnell’s “Better Care Reconciliation Act” has nothing to do with “replacing” Obamacare. For 25 years, Republicans have never wanted to enable universal health care coverage for the American people, but only to prevent the Democratic Party from doing so. We know this—that is, that Republicans feared not Obamacare’s failure, but its success—because they told us so. Barack Obama himself never fully articulated this crucial point. During an August 2013 press conference, President Obama pondered why the GOP's "number one priority, the one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don't have health care." But in attributing the 40-plus Affordable Care Act repeal votes, the threats to shut down the government over Obamacare funding, the tens of millions of dollars in misleading ads and another summer of town hall rage to the GOP's "ideological fixation," the president was only partly right. At its core, the Republicans' scorched-earth opposition to Obamacare has never been so much about "freedom" or "limited government" or any other right-wing ideological buzzword as it has been about political power, pure and simple. Now as for the past 20 years, Republicans have feared not that health care reform would fail the American people, but that it would succeed. Along with Social Security and Medicare, successful healthcare reform would provide the third and final pillar of Americans' social safety net, all brought you by the Democratic Party."