Watching the Republicans react to John Roberts’ ruling on ObamaCare is a lot like going to an exotic zoo and seeing animals you’ve never seen before. Their behavior is unfamiliar and fascinating. I guess we’re used to the collective freak-out aspect of it, but they seem so stunned and disoriented. It’s also kind of revealing in the sense that many conservative politicians are showing that they really believe their own horseshit.
On the one hand, you have savvy politicians like Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who came out and said he wasn’t surprised because the mandate was clearly a tax. He knows the GOP has been engaged in pure political posturing. But then you have guys like Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia, who tweeted that he felt like he had lost two friends today: John Roberts and America.
Let’s be honest. Most of these pols are smart enough to know that making people pay a small fine if they aren’t insured isn’t going to change the fundamental character of this country. It’s not a slippery slope that will soon find the government taxing people for having children or getting married, as Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina suggested today. What these folks are afraid of is something different.
They are afraid that people will like these reforms when they are fully implemented and demand that the government continue to regulate and improve the system. Let’s start with the CBO estimate that the bill will eventually result in 30 million people getting health insurance who would not otherwise have it. Think about that number for a minute. And then ask yourself, “who could possibly think that is a bad thing?”
The answer is obvious. If you don’t like the Democratic Party, you are not going to like the idea of 30 million voters out there who only have health insurance because of the Democratic Party. Republicans don’t like this bill because they know it makes the Democratic Party stronger.
If there is a slippery slope, it isn’t that the government will use today’s ruling to start infringing on people’s rights in other areas. The slippery slope is created when a family of four, making four times the poverty rate ($88,200 annually) gets a $1,480 subsidy to help them afford their health insurance and sees their maximum out-of-pocket annual premium capped at $8,379 (or 9.5% of annual income).
The Affordable Care Act benefits too many people. Once people see those benefits they will be grateful for them and think the government is doing something nice and valuable for them. Anyone who tries to lower their subsidy or raise their cap is going to get punished. And the party that tried to destroy all of this at the Supreme Court? They’re the new enemy.
At the most basic, the Affordable Care Act will put a lot of money in a lot of struggling folks hands. And that is not good for the Republican Party that desperately needs struggling people to see the government as an unhelpful antagonist.
The new national health care plan was implemented several years ago by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts. It now covers over 98% of the citizens of the Bay State. No one thinks the bill is tyrannical, because it isn’t. It does matter whether something is done on the state of federal level, but health care isn’t an issue where the jurisdictional origin makes any difference in people’s lives. The sting of being coerced into buying private health insurance you don’t want isn’t any lesser or greater if it comes from the governor’s office or the Oval Office. Republicans that have convinced themselves otherwise are delusional.
Republicans should be happy that America came up with a solution for health care that preserved a robust private health insurance industry. In that sense, the right won. But so many of them seem genuinely to believe that this health care reform spells doom for our country. Some of them are actually confused. The rest realize that the Democrats just won a great victory by winning many new adherents who will make it tougher for them to win elections and enact the kind of policies in other arenas that they would like to enact.
