The downside to the Republicans proposing a healthcare bill is that it’s a major legislative disappointment, given they’ve spent seven years symbolically opposing healthcare. The upside is that, at least, we have something substantive to discuss about healthcare. The silver lining is possibly voters will come to see the Republican party for its cynicism.
What is there to talk about? We could start with David Brooks on how we got to the point wherein the GOP has received their moment in the sun. He argues that neglecting three ideas led us to the propaganda of the Trump era:
First, the crisis of opportunity. People with fewer skills were seeing their wages stagnate, the labor markets evaporate. Second, the crisis of solidarity. The social fabric, especially for those without a college degree, was disintegrating — marriage rates plummeting, opiate abuse rates rising. Third, the crisis of authority. Distrust in major institutions crossed some sort of threshold. People had so lost trust in government, the media, the leadership class in general, that they were willing to abandon truth and decorum and embrace authoritarian thuggery to blow it all up.
Brooks argued Obama should have addressed these crises, which the ACA arguably did for the second. IMO, Republicans stoked all three of these fires while pointing their fingers elsewhere. Supply side economics built the first crisis, privatization the second, and propaganda media the third.
Meanwhile in Congress, Paul Ryan is rolling up his sleeves and saying taking healthcare away from Americans is about giving them freedom. Paul Ryan’s Misguided Sense of Freedom:
...But Mr. Ryan is sure they will come up with something because they know, as he said in a recent tweet, “Freedom is the ability to buy what you want to fit what you need.”He went on to argue that Obamacare abridges this freedom by telling you what to buy. But his first thought offers a meaningful and powerful definition of freedom. Conservatives are typically proponents of negative liberty: the freedom from constraints and impediments. Mr. Ryan formulated a positive liberty: freedom derived from having what it takes to fulfill one’s needs and therefore to direct one’s own life.
(Positive and negative freedom, as terminology, always confuse me; this bit is well written!) This op-ed makes a nice point: healthcare as envisioned by Obamacare, and other more progressive schemes, imagine an America where we are free from worrying about health care. Preventative care happens because we needn’t worry whether we should spend the money elsewhere or take the day off. Major health care events like pregancy or major illness are only intimidating because they are life events, not life-changing unfunded expenditures.
I cannot understand why, outside of deep cynicism of the American dream, Republicans in Congress would not want this kind of free world.
