GOP to the Uninsured: Drop Dead, Don't Use Contraception

To listen to Mitt Romney's campaign ads, one would think that the Republican Party was actually concerned about the nation's economy.  But the actions of Republicans in the House of Representatives reveal the GOP's real agenda: keeping millions of Americans without health care coverage and controlling a woman's vagina and uterus.  And as for the economy, the only real focus is to destroy it in the hopes of destroying Barack Obama.  The collateral damage done to countless lives and families doesn't matter.  It's not even on the GOP's radar screen.  First a column in the Washington Post looks at the continued quest to kill health care reform and the promise of health care coverage to some 30 million Americans, many of whom are children.  Here are excerpts:

The House is voting (again) to repeal the Affordable Care Act on Wednesday.  Meanwhile, six Republican governors (so far) say they won’t go along with the law’s planned Medicaid expansion for 4 million uninsured people in their states, even though the feds would pick up nearly all the tab.

Republican message to uninsured Americans in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling couldn’t be clearer: You’re on your own. 

The party may not have officially adopted the “let ’em die” policy of right-wing hecklers at that CNN primary debate, when Ron Paul was asked what should be done when uninsured folks show up at the hospital. But as a practical matter, Republicans are in pretty unsavory territory. What other conclusion can we draw when Rick Perry, who presides over a state where fully one in four people lack health coverage, makes swaggering indifference to these Texans’ plight a point of sovereign pride? 

In America — alone among wealthy nations — everyone is a pink slip or job change or new illness away from finding they’ve lost coverage or are uninsurable.  This is the shameful reality behind the GOP’s rhetoric on health care. Republicans don’t want to spend a penny to insure the uninsured.

As the ranks of the uninsured have soared, the size of Republican compassion has shriveled. Why?

Daniel Patrick Moynihan gave me the most convincing explanation not long before he died in 2003. “Those folks never vote for us,” he told me, summing up the Republican mind on the issue, “and we have our priorities for the money.”  Like trillions more in tax cuts for the best-off Americans over the next decade. 

Here’s what you should do, Mr. President. In the debates this fall, pull out a small laminated card you’ve had made as a prop for this purpose. Then remind Mitt Romney that the ranks of the uninsured today are equal to the combined populations of Oklahoma, Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Kansas, Kentucky, Arkansas, Utah, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming. Read that list slowly, Mr. President. Then ask your opponent: Would America turn its back on the citizens of these 25 states if everyone there lacked basic health coverage? That’s what we’ve been doing for decades.

What strikes me is the callousness and utter lack of compassion for other living, breathing human beings demonstrated by the GOP.  The hypocrisy is even more stomach wrenching as Republican elected officials and candidates profess their Christian beliefs and stick their noses so far up the ass of the Christian Right that it's a wonder they don't suffocate.  And then there's the GOP obsession with controlling sexual practices of women.  As The Hill reports, another effort is underway to kill the contraception mandate under the health care reform package of the Obama administration:

A new Republican bill would remove the teeth from a contentious Obama administration health mandate by barring the federal government from penalizing employers that do not comply.

The measure was written in response to the Affordable Care Act, which requires that most employers cover birth control without a co-pay for employees. Under the GOP bill, employers that object to birth control for religious reasons can refuse to cover it without facing financial penalties from the government. 

Sensenbrenner's bill would erase the taxes faced by employers who choose not to cover certain healthcare benefits "by reason of adherence to a religious belief or moral conviction." 

The GOP "moral conviction" is to increase unwanted pregnancies and once those babies are born to kick them to the curb and leave them uninsured.   Once a baby exits its mothers womb, in the world of the GOP it's on its own. The Party's moral bankruptcy is nearly complete.