As ObamaCare falls apart and the public grows increasingly grouchy, President Obama has tried to head the defund and repeal movements off by claiming they don’t have any alternatives to offer. This segues into the usual hackneyed slander about how Republicans just want to take away health care and watch people die. That’s not hyperbole. As recently as two weeks ago (before he nipped off for his fourth luxury vacation of the year), the President declared at a press conference, “The one unifying principle in the Republican Party at the moment is making sure that 30 million people don’t have health care. Why is it that my friends in the other party have made the idea of preventing these people from getting health care their holy grail? Their number one priority?”
Of course, Obama conveniently leaves out that we’ll still have 30 million uninsured under his plan, too. And that comes straight from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, not a conservative think tank. ObamaCare costs trillions of dollars, kills countless jobs, jacks up the price of insurance for most Americans… and leaves us right back where we started, as far as the uninsured population is concerned. The net effect mostly consists of slightly rearranging the deck chairs on the S.S. Uninsured America, which is a lot like the Titanic, except passage is far more expensive, and booking a ticket is mandatory.
It’s always been untrue to claim there are no Republican alternatives. But it’s also not good enough for the defunders and repealers to point at individual suggestions from years gone by to defend themselves against charges of legislative vandalism. That’s no way to win a messaging war. And we do need to plan for the post-ObamaCare world. God knows the Democrats have, although they only like to discuss their plans in front of socialized medicine enthusiasts. Instead of allowing the Affordable Care Act to run its course and destroy the insurance market as planned, paving the way for the bloody death-spiral nightmare of single-payer nationalized medicine, Republicans need a unified message to rally the great diaspora of ObamaCare refugees – from small business owners to unionized workers. The GOP must be able to say, “First we repeal ObamaCare, or neutralize it until we’ve got a Republican in the White House… and then we do this.”
No comments:
Post a Comment