The GOP- Rooting for Failure and Against Families and Children

I do not adhere to many Democrat positions, yet given the ugliness of today's Republican Party - a sickening mix of greed, racism, homophobia, religious extremism and open hatred toward those deemed to be "other" - I often find that I have no choice but to back Democrat candidates.  A perfect example is the just past Virginia elections where the Christofascist controlled Virginia GOP nominated truly insane and vicious candidates for all three statewide offices.  Another example is the GOP's efforts to sabotage the Affordable Health Care Act yet offer nothing to replace it other than a return to system that is not only the the most costly in the world and but also the least efficient .  And what about the millions of uninsured?  They are to be left to simply sicken and die.  Even as the GOP base congratulates itself on its adherence to Christian values and the mantra of personal responsibility.  A column in the New York Times looks at this sabotage effort.  Here are excerpts:

I just spent 15 minutes on my local health care exchange and realized that I could save a couple hundred dollars a month on my family’s insurance. Of course, I live in Washington State, which has a very competitive market, a superbly functioning website and no Koch-brothers-sponsored saboteurs trying to discourage people from getting health care.

California is just as good. It’s enrolling more than 2,000 people a day. New York is humming as well. And Kentucky, it’s the gold standard now: More than 56,000 people have signed up for new health care coverage — enough to fill a stadium in Louisville. 

This is terrible news [for the GOP], and cannot be allowed to continue. If there’s even a small chance that, say, half of the 50 million or so Americans currently without heath care might get the same thing that every other advanced country offers its citizens, that would be a disaster [for the GOP]. 

But not to worry. The failure movement is active and very well funded. . . . . The Republican Party started a failure campaign earlier this year, but then the strategy got sidetracked in a coercive government shutdown that cost us all $24 billion or so. With the disastrous rollout of the federal exchange, Republicans now smell blood. A recent memo outlined a far-reaching, multilevel assault on the Affordable Care Act. 

It’s hard to remember a time when a major political party and its media arm were so actively rooting for fellow Americans to lose. When the first attempt by the United States to launch a satellite into orbit, in 1957, ended in disaster, did Democrats start to cheer, and unify to stop a space program in its infancy? Or, when Medicare got off to a confusing start, did Republicans of the mid-1960s wrap their entire political future around a campaign to deny government-run health care to the elderly? 

Of course not. But for the entirety of the Obama era, Republicans have consistently been cheerleaders for failure. They rooted for the economic recovery to sputter, for gas prices to spike, the job market to crater, the rescue of the American automobile industry to fall apart.

This organized schadenfreude goes back to the dawn of Obama’s presidency, when Rush Limbaugh, later joined by Senator Mitch McConnell, said their No. 1 goal was for the president to fail.

Does this mean we throw in the towel, and return to a status quo in which insurance companies routinely cancel policies, deny health care to people with pre-existing conditions and have their own death panel treatment for patients who reach a cap in medical benefits? 

The Republican plan would do just that, because they have no plan but to crush the nation’s fledgling experiment. 

Where was the media attention when thousands of people were routinely dumped once they got sick? When did Republicans in Congress hold an oversight hearing on the leading cause of personal bankruptcy — medical debt? All of that is what we had before. And all of that is what we will return to if some version of the Affordable Care Act is not made workable.  

Not too sound too dramatic, but I increasingly do not understand how decent, moral people can support today's GOP.  Of my friends that remain Republicans, sadly most are motivated by greed.  They care nothing for the less fortunate and focus solely on paying less in taxes being to short sighted to understand we all pay when millions of Americans - many of them children - go without health care coverage.