Health Care Reform: Republican Folly

Barack Obama succeeded where all the other presidents of the United States since Teddy Roosevelt have failed: health insurance coverage. After a thousand and one modifications to the original plan, a majority of elected officials finally adopted it, but only after a political battle so ferocious that the country is at its most divided since the Second World War.

Of all the major reforms devised by American presidents since 1945, the one concocted by Obama will be the only one not voted on by a representative of the opposition. Not one Republican could find any merit to a program that will extend health insurance coverage to 95 percent of the population by 2019. It shows how much the partisan fury of the Republicans has reached a pitch of absolutism, if not fanaticism. By fanning fears and adding fictions, not to say lies, Republicans imprinted on the entire debate a shameful dose of cynicism that heralds, just a few months from the midterm elections, a struggle of rare ferocity.

By acting as it did, by using the Tea Party as a tool — the American version of the French National Front — the Republican party succeeded in hiding this fact: when it comes to health care, the government, that evil government, has been present, very present for quite some time. Indeed, when you add the Medicaid and Medicare programs to less ambitious ones, not to mention fiscal incentives granted to enterprises, half of Americans receive, directly or indirectly, some form of assistance from a government so demonized that one must wonder if Republicans, as well as their libertarian and neoliberal allies are not aspiring to a return of the law of the jungle.

Yesterday morning, barely a few hours after the passage of the bill, not fewer than eleven state governors announced that they would go to court to seek to have this reform declared unconstitutional on the ground that it impinges on states’ rights. As in all cases where irrationality is pronounced, this one presents an enormous paradox.

Indeed, it so happens that the watered down version of the bill that just passed the House of Representatives, and that the Senate should soon ratify, is in fact almost a carbon copy of the health care insurance program that residents of Massachusetts benefit from. It was introduced while Mitt Romney was governor. And so? It might have been forgotten, but Romney was and still is a member of the Republican Party. He was even a Republican candidate in the last presidential election.

This paradox is very telling of the indecency of Obama’s opponents. One must know that after Sarah Palin, who could have become vice president (!), declared that this plan would create death panels, other elected officials have not stopped to reduce this reform to a caricature by way of the most obtuse demagogic criticism. For instance, one elected official stated that the plan was nothing more than “positive discrimination on steroids meant to decide who plays doctor and who obtains treatment based on skin color.” What else? Immediately after the vote, Republican representatives did not find anything smarter to say than that a slice of “freedom just died.”

The action of the Republicans in the last few months was so obscene as to make one wonder if judgment has not been erased from their political software.