Pressed to say what Republicans might do to help the 30 million people that the Affordable Care Act is expected to provide with health insurance, should they actually repeal the bill, Sen. Mitch McConnell said, "That's not the issue."
And if you follow what he, Mitt Romney, and other Republicans have said about health care over the past two years, you see that this is no aberration. They don't think that people without health insurance is or ought to be a political issue.
The various Democratic approaches to health care reform all assume that the government should be helping all Americans to get health insurance, so they can get the care they need. (And so the burden of caring for sick people is shared more equitably.)
Republicans do not agree. They think the government's job is only to do such tinkering as might help the health insurance marketplace work more smoothly, and then get out of the way. Whether poor people get health care, they argue, is not the government's problem. People without health insurance should work harder, save money, and buy their own plans. That this is effectively impossible for people with pre-existing conditions is not the government's problem either; those people, I guess, should get the sort of jobs that provide care to all employees.
So there you have it. If you think all Americans should be able to get health insurance, even the poor and sick, vote Obama. If you think that is not the government's business, and whether people get health care ought to be up to them, vote Romney.
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4 comments:
How you frame the issue matters, and your last paragraph frames it exactly as the Republicans would. No normal person would say, "I think the government should work to help everyone have health insurance," just as no normal person would say, "if you can't get health insurance because you're out of work, poor, or already sick, too bad." Since you're not a politician or party worker, you should either present both propositions in their most attractive guises, or in their most unattractive. As in, "should the government be able to force everyone to buy health insurance, or should only people with money get health care?" That pairing presents each choice in its most unattractive guise.
What think you of the new version?
It looks fair to me.
I think a basic problem in our contemporary discourse is that the Right has succeeded in shifting our language so that we now say liberals "believe in government," which is a little like saying that the core conservative belief is hatred of the poor or women or some such--it may or may not have some truth to it, but either description is really a criticism. It seems to me what liberals actually believe is that we need to take some problems so seriously that, if nothing else works, we have to use government to solve them. This was certainly the message of FDR's first inaugural speech. I don't think any US liberals believe in government as some sort of principle all by itself.
a disappointing tenet common to both wings of our narrowly two-party system is authoritarianism regarding personal choices protected by the constitution (or supreme court decisions). take as examples:
1) the debacle that 'obamacare' has become -- no public option but instead required healthcare
2) anti-abortion laws
3) gun control
4) erosion of privacy (patriot act, pipa, etc.)
authoritarian regimes are particularly favorable to certain industries. beneficiaries in this climate have been the rich, financial and insurance conglomerates, and extractive industries such as oil and gas, who though regulated to a small degree, get virtually all they ask for even from moderate democrats.
and, to your (@david) point about neocons instilling a belief that liberals believe in government, correct that it happened, and unfortunately a large number of citizens seem to both believe it, and fail to see the failure of logic inherent in that position. if neocons truly wanted small government across the board (which is not at all the case), then we would likely be pondering our choices in a ron paul vs. obama race, wherein obama would truly look like a tax-and-spend liberal, and ron paul's mostly coherent positions regarding reducing the scope of government would stand in clear opposition.
as it is, 'shrinking government' simply means, unevenly drain budget from programs that make long-term improvements in citizens' lives, and thus continue to subsidize or even increase spending in neocon favorites such as the oil and gas industry, military spending and foreign wars, and failing to proportionally tax the rich.
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