Friday, June 06, 2014

Memo to GOP: The War Over Health Care is Over


Just like those who centuries ago refused to believe that the world wasn't flat and that the earth revolved around the Sun and not vice versa, Republicans refuse to accept the reality that the war against the Affordable Health Care Act is largely over except in their minds.  Even the Virginia Chamber of Commerce is in the process of setting up a private health insurance exchange to make up for Virginia's failure to do so because of Virginia GOP opposition to anything that relates to Barack Obama.  Meanwhile, we see Mitch McConnell lying to voters in his state about the benefits that "Obamacare" has brought to over 300,000 citizens of Kentucky.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at GOP blindness to reality.  Here are highlights:

The federal government has released new data on Medicaid enrollment showing that with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, six million Americans were added to the program’s rolls. 

That’s six million low-income people who now have health coverage, who can see a doctor when they need to and who don’t have to worry about whether an accident or an illness will send them spiraling into utter financial ruin.

The numbers reveal something else, too, something that should horrify conservatives: we’re well on our way to health-care socialism.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But only a slight one. And at a time when the press is realizing that Republicans are losing their taste for anti-Obamacare bloviating (more on that in a moment), it shows that Bill Kristol’s nightmare has nearly come true.

Back in 1993, Kristol wrote Republicans an enormously influential memo advising that the best approach to Bill Clinton’s health reform plan was notto do everything they could to kill it outright. If any plan managed to pass, he warned, “it will re-legitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.”

[T]here are now 64 million Americans on Medicaid and CHIP.  On top of that, there are now over 52 million seniors on Medicare. There are another 9 million veterans enrolled in the Veterans Health Service.

That’s a total of 125 million Americans getting their insurance from the federal government (or, in the case of Medicaid, a federal-state program). The current U.S. population is 318 million. That means that 39 percent of us, or just under two out of every five Americans, are recipients of government health insurance.

Conservatives, on the other hand, view this as a disaster. What they’ve only partly come to terms with is the fact that it’s going to be almost impossible for them to do anything about it. 

It’s true that Republicans appear to have realized that while the ACA remains unpopular, the idea of repealing it is even less popular. Which is why, as the November election approaches, they’ve almost stopped trying to elevate the issue. 

[M]ultiple Republican Senate candidates are now mouthing support for Obamacare’s general goals and have essentially been reduced to gibberish when trying to explain their “repeal and replace” 
stance.

[E]ven if Republicans took back the White House and both houses of Congress, moving people off their government insurance would be next to impossible.

Any Republican plan to unwind the ACA is going to run headlong into people’s fear of change and be stopped in its tracks. Are you going to push 64 million Medicaid and CHIP recipients off their current insurance and onto private plans? Are you going to move away from employer-provided coverage? Are you going to privatize Medicare?

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