Republicans Going All-In to Take Health Care Away from Millions of Americans
“Obamacare is a failure because our sabotage has successfully slowed its implementation.”
So we’re approaching the Supreme Court’s decision on the King-v-Burwellcase, in which the GOP turns a drafting error in the ACA into a pry-bar for taking health care away from some 7 million Americans. I confess to still being stunned that they have consciously chosen to make this beastliness their calling card. One wonders how they’ll face their constituents if they actually succeed.
One thing we know they’ll do is try to blame their monstrous behavior on someone else. Like this (courtesy of Professor Krugman):
Obamacare is a failed policy, because we may be able to kill it with an absurd legal challenge! It’s a policy version of the classic definition of chutzpah: killing your mother and father, then pleading for mercy because you’re an orphan.
But Thuneism is just a more naked version of the style of argument we’ve been seeing all along. Conservatives are constantly belittling the ACA for its failure to cover all the uninsured — only one-third covered, it’s often asserted, although that number is out of date and also ignores the fact that the law wasn’t supposed to cover undocumented immigrants. But what’s the biggest factor limiting coverage? Um, refusal of red states to expand Medicaid and their refusal to help implement the rest of the law:
In states that want Obamacare to work, most of the eligible uninsured have already been covered. So the general complaint is that “Obamacare is a failure because our sabotage has successfully slowed its implementation.” Thune is just taking that logic a bit further.
