The Health Care Ruling - The Real Winners

I am repeatedly dumbfounded by the way in which the GOP manages to use its anti-tax mantra or its claimed devotion to conservative Christianity - white conservative Christianity, of course - to dupe the biased and downright stupid into supporting policies and laws that are decidedly against their own best interests.  The Founding Fathers recognized the importance of an informed electorate and sadly, with most of the right getting their news from outlets like Fox News and the Drudge Report, the have no clue as to what is really going on most of the time (remember the study that found regular Fox News viewers less informed on issues than those who did not watch any news programs regularly?).  In a column in the New York Times Paul Krugman lays out the winners under yesterdays health care ruling and compares the costs with the GOP tax cuts for the wealthy.  Guess which one costs the government more.  Here are highlights:

There will, no doubt, be many headlines declaring this a big victory for President Obama, which it is. But the real winners are ordinary Americans — people like you. 

 

How many people are we talking about? You might say 30 million, the number of additional people the Congressional Budget Office says will have health insurance thanks to Obamacare. But that vastly understates the true number of winners because millions of other Americans — including many who oppose the act — would have been at risk of being one of those 30 million. 

So add in every American who currently works for a company that offers good health insurance but is at risk of losing that job (and who isn’t in this world of outsourcing and private equity buyouts?); every American who would have found health insurance unaffordable but will now receive crucial financial help; every American with a pre-existing condition who would have been flatly denied coverage in many states. 

In short, unless you belong to that tiny class of wealthy Americans who are insulated and isolated from the realities of most people’s lives, the winners from that Supreme Court decision are your friends, your relatives, the people you work with — and, very likely, you.  

But what about the cost? Put it this way: the budget office’s estimate of the cost over the next decade of Obamacare’s “coverage provisions” — basically, the subsidies needed to make insurance affordable for all — is about only a third of the cost of the tax cuts, overwhelmingly favoring the wealthy, that Mitt Romney is proposing over the same period. 

So the law that the Supreme Court upheld is an act of human decency that is also fiscally responsible. It’s not perfect, by a long shot — it is, after all, originally a Republican plan,  .  .  .  .  

Which brings us to the nature of the people who tried to kill health reform — and who will, of course, continue their efforts despite this unexpected defeat.   At one level, the most striking thing about the campaign against reform was its dishonesty. Remember “death panels”?  .   .   .   .   the unscrupulous nature of the campaign against reform was exceptional. And, rest assured, all the old lies and probably a bunch of new ones will be rolled out again in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision. 

But what was and is really striking about the anti-reformers is their cruelty. It would be one thing if, at any point, they had offered any hint of an alternative proposal to help Americans with pre-existing conditions, Americans who simply can’t afford expensive individual insurance, Americans who lose coverage along with their jobs. But it has long been obvious that the opposition’s goal is simply to kill reform, never mind the human consequences. 

The point is that this isn’t over — not on health care, not on the broader shape of American society. The cruelty and ruthlessness that made this court decision such a nail-biter aren’t going away.

Yes, note the cruelty of opponents.  In their minds those who can't afford coverage or who cannot obtain coverage are merely disposable.  Human trash, if you will.  And what's chilling is that most of these opponents are the ones who claim to support  "family values" and wear their religiosity on their sleeves.  The biggest threat to compassion and decency in this country comes from Christian conservatives many of whom make the Pharisees of the Gospel look like very upright and virtuous people.