Lets talk about death panels. You wouldnt know it from the friendly name dreamt up by freedom loving red-blooded American reality TV stars, but death panels are great. They are common sense. They are smart. The Republican rhetoric on health care has been deliberately destructive and dishonest from the beginning, before even any details were known. The thinking behind it essentially amounted to a gleeful remembrance of how easily they had damaged the Clinton efforts at meaningful reform. Before the first line of the law had been written, Republicans saw in it not an opportunity to help Americans, but a chance to make it Obamas Waterloo. They knew they were against it before they knew enough about it to be for it. Before they knew a single thing about what reform would look like, they knew they were going to play on the publics easily manipulated fear of change. They knew they would call it too expensive before they knew what it would cost and how it would be paid for. They knew they would call it a government takeover, call it socialism, a job killer, and call it putting government between you and your doctor no matter what the details were. They knew this because they did it in 1993 and it worked then to propel them in a political victory in 1994, and there was no reason they couldnt make people fearful of what they didnt understand and use it again for political gain in 2009. Rather than engaging in thoughtful discussion and meaningful public education on what the options were, the tradeoffs, the costs and benefits, they sent angry hecklers to disrupt townhalls, people who had been told that Obama was trying to bring socialism. They were angry, but not justly angry. They were angry because conservatives had intentionally lied to them. So the GOP has been deliberately dishonest about health reform every step of the way, and they did manage to get their political victory in 2010 by lying to voters. And as a result theyve been able to block every good thing that might have been done since then, while at the same time blaming Obama for not doing anything. Sadly, many people fall for this innocent saboteur routine. But they still havent managed to defeat Obamacare. And with luck we will be able to see in 2020 what the record of five years of Obamacare really is. By then the facts of a very complicated topic will be undeniable data that cant be dismissed by clever lies. Of all the lying and deceit the GOP has worked hard to dream up, or perhaps easily stumbled upon in their fearful conspiracy addled minds, the lie of Death Panels has been one of the nastiest and most ignorant lies. Harold Pollack straightens out the record in this great Politico piece.
Posted on: Wed, 09 Jul 2014 12:51:36 +0000
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