paul987109 Loc: Oscoda

This is a post from the progressive "Daily Kos" website, which I'd like to share here. I thought it was well done.



They all h**ed 'Obamacare'—until they found out how repealing it would affect them
- By Dartagnan


“Now that you’ve insured an additional 20 million people, you can’t just take the insurance away from these people,”
he added. “It’s just not the right thing to do.”

As Mr. Brahin goes, so goes the nation.

This is why the Republican Party could not pass a bill repealing the Affordable Care Act, and why the Trump administration’s vindictive attempts to sabotage, it even after the GOP failed to repeal it, may end up damaging the Republican Party in ways that, just last year, it couldn’t possibly imagine.

But it’s also a story about ignorance. About how millions of Americans were duped for nearly a quarter century by a right-wing [owned] media establishment that attempted, for purely political purposes, to demonize an effort to make Americans lives (particularly those Americans not cut from the same cloth as the Republicans’ donor base)—far more pleasant, safe, and livable.

When President Trump was elected, his party’s long-cherished goal of dismantling the Affordable Care Act seemed all but assured. But eight months later, Republicans seem to have done what the Democrats who passed the law never could: make it popular among a majority of Americans.

You can cite figures until you turn blue in the face about how every major Western developed country in the world provides free or inexpensive health care for its citizens. The simple reason for this is that the people in those countries demanded it, and their elected governments responded. But Americans in this so-called “free-market” economy have for the past 25 years been carpet-bombed by a corporate-owned media with every possible piece of propaganda that the health care industry—from insurance companies to hedge funds to drug manufacturers—could dream of, to try to gin up an antipathy among the American public towards the very idea of universal health care.

The first real fusillade by corporations exercising their economic muscle was the scary shibboleth of “socialized medicine.” The imaginary horror of Americans crowded in lines and being treated by grim, unfeeling gray-faced bureaucrats armed with needles and stethoscopes seemed to do the trick, for a while. It was a movie fantasy, and a bad one at that. But it worked, and President Clinton’s ambitious plan in 1992 to provide health care coverage to all Americans was successfully defeated in the early years of his presidency.
.........................................................................

But then came the Great Recession, which many Americans slowly, surely, came to realize was brought down on their heads in large part by those same cold, unthinking and wholly dispassionate corporate interests that had originally defeated the idea of universal health care. Suddenly huge numbers of Americans, thrown into an economic disaster not of their own making, at long last began to comprehend that as citizens in the richest nation in the world they deserved what most Europeans, all Canadians, and the largest countries in South America have taken for granted for decades.

So President Obama, running explicitly and unabashedly on a program of expanding affordable health care coverage to all Americans, seized the moment and acted, assisted by a Democratic Congress. The Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) was passed by a hair’s breadth, despite rabid opposition by ideologues in the Republican Party who recognized that popularizing the idea of government actually serving the public interest could affect their contributors’ greed for unlimited and unchecked profits.

This was a terrifying prospect to them, so they banded together and created phony “grassroots” organizations called things like “FreedomWorks” and “Americans For Prosperity.” It didn’t matter that these organizations had barely any members among the actual, human, American public—what mattered was they were funded by billionaires who saw their potential for profit being threatened by the prospect of what they smirkingly referred to as another “entitlement” for American citizens.

These “groups” of purportedly “concerned citizens” received a grossly outsized proportion of media attention compared to the number actual, real people supporting them. A new, media-fueled creation called “The Tea Party” was quickly “enlisted” to achieve their goals, with the help of many of the right’s useful media i***ts on Fox News and CNBC. And many Americans duly followed their pronouncements like dumb sheep, protesting in their Representatives’ “Town Halls” the very idea of a health care law that would make their lives better.

The fact that a black president was behind the law played right into the hands of these groups. To achieve this bizarre, counter-intuitive “hatred” by Americans towards their own health care, a small group of these same billionaires, chiefly interested in maximizing their f****l f**l profits, and fearful of any new government “regulation,” bought themselves a generation of Republican stooges in the United States Congress by urging them to stoke the tried and true human impulse of r****m—an impulse apparently more overpowering in Americans than the biological imperative of reproduction—and one peculiarly suited to the American public with its sordid racial past. The mantra of “socialism”—which made no sense anymore with the fall of the C*******t bloc—was replaced by a concerted effort to gin up Americans’ hatred of the “undeserving,” i.e., the black and brown people who were characterized as tearing down the fabric of American society with their desire for a “free ride.”

But what they hadn’t counted on was the number of w***e A******ns who suddenly found themselves recovering from the 2007-2008 shock of corporate-induced destitution and unemployment. In the space of a single year of stark, economic calamity it wasn’t just those “minorities” who needed health care, but a huge swath of white America, particularly in Republican strongholds like Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Alaska, Missouri, and the deep South.
White people wanted health care now. Too many white people. And that presented a big, insoluble problem for Republicans:

Most profound, though, is this: After years of Tea Party demands for smaller government, Republicans are now pushing up against a growing
consensus that the government should guarantee health insurance. A Pew survey in January found that 60 percent of Americans believe the
federal government should be responsible for ensuring that all Americans have health coverage. That was up from 51 percent last year, and the
highest in nearly a decade.

The number of middle-class Republicans who now support the goals of the Affordable Health Care Act (“Obamacare”) has more than doubled in the last year.

The belief held even among many Republicans: 52 percent of those making below $30,000 a year said the federal government has a responsibility
to ensure health coverage, a huge jump from 31 percent last year. And 34 percent of Republicans who make between $30,000 and about $75,000
endorsed that view, up from 14 percent last year.

With that recognition have come the individual stories of those who finally realize just how good the Affordable Health Care Act has been for their lives:

“I can’t even remember why I opposed it,” said Patrick Murphy, who owns Bagel Barrel, on a quaint and bustling street near Mr. Brahin’s law office
here in Doylestown.

He thought Democrats “jammed it down our throats,” and like Mr. Brahin, he worried about the growing deficit. But, he said, he has provided
insurance for his own dozen or so employees since 1993. “Everybody needs some sort of health insurance,” Mr. Murphy said. “They’re trying to
repeal Obamacare but they don’t have anything in place.”

Mr. Murphy, quoted in the Times article linked above, “can’t remember” why he opposed it because he doesn’t want to admit that he opposed it because he was duped by Fox News. That’s understandable. The one thing that people are loathe to do more than anything is admit when they’re wrong.

This t***sformation in Americans’ attitudes towards a more proactive role in government in providing access to health care also extends to those who v**ed for Trump, although they are more motivated by its affordability than anything else:

Trump v**ers said they wanted the president and Congress to lower their health insurance premiums; they did not want to lose the Affordable
Care Act’s protections against insurers charging more to people with pre-existing conditions, or denying coverage of basic health benefits.

Funny how that worked out. Americans finally want the same right to health care for themselves and their families that most of the other people in the free world already have.

Who could have imagined that?

By all indications the Trump administration, licking its wounds from an unprecedented legislative defeat, intends to now sabotage the Act, to deliberately try to make it fail. If that’s what Trump intends he ought to check with his constituency first. Because he’ll be swimming against the stream, and leaving a whole lot of Republican congressmen to drown in his wake.