If you’re satisfied with your health care, rattle your jewelry
by Tom Sullivan
There are no cheap seats here.
Vice President Mike Pence yesterday visited a Republican National Committee retreat in Chicago. He meant to rally his party’s support for the Obamacare repeal bill coming to a vote in the Senate this week.
“This is our moment. Now is the time. Every moment Obamacare survives is another day America suffers,” the designated staffer posted to his Twitter account.
This is our moment. Now is the time. Every moment Obamacare survives is another day America suffers. pic.twitter.com/pChSEEkLE9— Mike Pence (@mike_pence) June 24, 2017
“Before summer’s out, we’ll repeal/replace Obamacare w(ith)/system based on personal responsibility, free market competition & state-based reform,” read another accompanied by a photo of a ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel.
“That’s the Republican way. That’s the American way,” he added. “And that’s the way we’re going to reform health care in the 21st Century.”
Not likely a John Lennon aficionado, Pence did not invite his audience instead of clapping to rattle their jewelry.
Hullabaloo’s Heather Digby Parton tweeted, “Seriously, any kid who gets leukemia needs a big lesson in personal responsibility.” There will be plenty of lessons to go around should the bill pass this week.
Before summer’s out, we'll repeal/replace Obamacare w/ system based on personal responsibility, free-market competition & state-based reform pic.twitter.com/JzCyxX9kJb— Mike Pence (@mike_pence) June 24, 2017
I’ve heard plenty of conservative talk-show tirades about liberal coastal elites. But proclaiming in this upscale Midwest venue that Republicans plan to make medical treatment contingent on “personal responsibility, free market competition & state-based reform” is about as coded and vaporous as anything a left-leaning, unpaid college intern might conceive. Except infinitely more cold-blooded. This kind of Kool-Aid for the commoners takes decades of right-wing-billionaire-funded messaging research to synthesize. Drink enough over time and even a Bible-believing vice president doesn’t know his soul has been poisoned.
How poisoned? Former North Carolina Democratic congressman Brad Miller was not on the committees that formulated Obamacare. He admits it’s flaws, but notes in a Facebook post this morning that Democrats failed on the atmospherics:
Democrats blew the politics by letting Republicans say it was all just about helping the poor and nobody else, just like something Democrats would do. I’m all for helping the poor, but expanding health insurance coverage and requiring standard benefits helps everyone, including the people who already have insurance. The cost of treatment for the poor, usually emergency care when they’re really sick or hurt rather than care to keep them healthy, gets shifted to everyone else in their insurance premiums. I asked the Tea Party delegation that visited me about the ACA what they would do about the uninsured who come to the emergency room with life-threatening illnesses or injuries. They said let them die.
According to the right’s ghoulish orthodoxy, the uninsured sick should have worked harder, planned better, and saved more. Dying will be a lesson to others of their kind in personal responsibility, and as a bonus decrease the surplus population.
If Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his colleagues get their way, those lessons may come swiftly and painfully. In Illinois alone, “650,000 residents could lose Medicaid coverage under the Senate bill, and subsequent effects of state law, in 2021,” the Chicago Tribune reckons.
Back up and look again at the Pence tweet, at the lies, lies, and more lies, and consider that the country is not only in the hands of an emotionally stunted man-child, but in the grasp of a political cult.