Letter 2 America for December 17, 2013

Dear America,

The current population of the Republican Party in office is the most clinically calculating class of politicians I have observed in my lifetime, and I'm 67.  Of course, when I was young I was not as observant about these things as I am now, nor was I interested.  The question of intellectual integrity was more immediate back then, such as who was for the war and who was against it; were you in favor of the Great Society as a concept or not.  Now, it's a matter of who is telling the truth about the facts, because the art of prevarication, that is telling enough truth to lead everyone to the wrong conclusion, has been elevated to an art form in American politics, and the Republicans seem to be the current grand masters of it.  For example, a few people--maybe it will be a million or two in the end if the anecdotal reports are the indicator that the Republicans calculate them to be--are receiving notification from insurers of increased premiums or decreased coverage for their health insurance plans while tens of thousands are actually finding insurance that they can afford and that will truly benefit them for the first times in their lives, and the Obamacare program is effectively little more than a few weeks old if you consider that it was totally inaccessible for the first three to four weeks of its existence.  There were over 100,000 newly insured people or families after that first three weeks of relatively efficient operation of the health insurance websites, including the websites of the states that didn't participate in the conservatives' calculated sabotage of the law in the form of preventing the creation of websites and/or refusing to allow federally-funded "navigators" to operate in their states so as to hinder those who want to enroll in spite of the politics involved.  There will be millions by next November, and probably tens of millions, who have never had health insurance before, and among them there will be thousands of stories about how Obamacare saved their lives or those of loved ones as opposed to the occasional story of some snide twenty-something in good health who now has to pay double if he or she wants to stay with his or her current insurer, and many of those will find something better at healthinsurance.com by that time.  And I suppose that my calculus is as susceptible of second guessing as theirs, but what are the odds?  Only experience will matter in the end, and media reports planted by either side won't matter much when feet start marching toward the polls, so it's a matter of how you decided to place your bet now, and frankly, I'd rather be us than them in that regard.

It isn't as though we have no experience with programs like Obamacare either.  When Social Security was created, conservative forces marshaled themselves against it, and similarly, when Medicare was created there was furious conservative opposition.  But any attempt to undermine either program today would be political suicide, and the Republicans know it.  You can ask Paul Ryan, the purveyor of the Medicare voucher scheme.  Add to that the fact that Obamacare is their idea...and demonstrably so...and you have a political strategy that looks more and more suicidal the more you look at it, but I can understand the Republican miscalculation to some extent.  George W. Bush went out into the country to try to sell the idea of privatizing Social Security with considerable conservative backing, and all he got for his trouble was a decline in his popularity even beyond what resulted from starting two wars that cost trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives.  Then there's Medicare Part D...the drug program for seniors...which used private insurers to operate coverage for seniors' medications.  It was incredibly expensive in terms of tax dollars...unlike Social Security and Medicare Parts A and B, which are funded by payroll contributions from prospective beneficiaries...and the national debt soared under the impetus of Part D plus those two wars.  Those ideas...Privatized Social Security and Medicare Part D...are two ideas that are structurally analogous to Obamacare--both employ private enterprise to implement governmentally mandated programs in accord with the Republican/conservative/Randian notion that government should be invisible and only business is efficient--and both have Republican fingerprints all over them, but that's not all.  When Hillary Clinton was leading a commission during her husband's administration looking into universal health care and that commission seemed to be leaning toward a single payer system, the Republicans came up with what became Romneycare in Massachusetts, which is exactly the same as Obamacare no matter what old Mitt has to say about it: both implement ostensibly universal health care through mandated private insurance coverage.  How much more Republican than Obamacare can an idea be?  But instead of saying, "We invented that," as the Russians used to say about everything American in the fifties, they are trying to undermine the effort...and without success in the end, and they have univocally disavowed it instead of embracing it and trying to take credit.

Once the Republicans figure out how they blundered into the mess they will find themselves in come next summer it will be too late.  They will already have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory...generally the Democrats' specialty...for an idea that was finally beneficial in some way: the privatization of the American safety net.  But the reason for that success is the individual mandate, which is the same reason that Social Security and Medicare succeeded while Medicare Part D is something less than a success in terms of cost/benefit analysis for the nation as a whole, and that is an idea that Republicans will never accept.  So, the Democratic monopoly on social conscience remains in tact and the Republican image of...well, that remains in tact too.  Chalk up one more for the good guys, albeit with an assist from the opposition.

Your friend,

\

Mike