Today's GOP: Cruelty, Incompetence and Lies

As I note frequently, I am a former Republican.  Once upon a time I held a city committee seat for the Republican Party of Virginia Beach.  I even was the original incorporator of that entity as filings at the Virginia State Corporation Commission confirm.  Yet now I find myself embarrassed to ever have been a Republican give the hideousness of today's Republican Party.  A hideousness starkly revealed by the Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill currently in the U.S. Senate which would have millions of Americans and leave those with pre-existing conditions without coverage.  Virtually every part of the healthcare industry opposes the bill as does AARP which will hopefully go on a rampage against Republicans in the 2018 election cycle if this travesty passes (if it does, it will be based solely on Republican votes).  So why is the GOP leadership pushing so hard for this bill?  Two main factors, in my view: thanks to Citizens United, the big money players in the GOP donor class want its passage and will punish the GOP if this massive tax cut for the wealthy disguised as "reform" is not passed.  The other factor is the make up the GOP base which is controlled by Christofascists and racists, groups best defined by their hatred of others and their hatred of Barack Obama.  In their warped and hate-filled minds, this bill will punish minorities and others they despise.  The irony will be, of course, that they themselves will end up suffering greatly when many find themselves without health care at some point down the road.  A column in the New York Times looks at the cruelty, incompetence and lies behind this foul bill.  Here are excerpts:

Graham-Cassidy, the health bill the Senate may vote on next week, is stunningly cruel. It’s also incompetently drafted: The bill’s sponsors clearly had no idea what they were doing when they put it together. Furthermore, their efforts to sell the bill involve obvious, blatant lies.

Nonetheless, the bill could pass. And that says a lot about today’s Republican Party, none of it good.

The Affordable Care Act, which has reduced the percentage of Americans without health insurance to a record low, created a three-legged stool: regulations that prevent insurers from discriminating against people with pre-existing conditions, a requirement that individuals have adequate insurance (and thus pay into the system while healthy) and subsidies to make that insurance affordable. For the lowest-income families, insurance is provided directly by Medicaid.

Graham-Cassidy saws off all three legs of that stool. Like other Republican plans, it eliminates the individual mandate. It replaces direct aid to individuals with block grants to states, under a formula that sharply reduces funding relative to current law, and especially penalizes states that have done a good job of reducing the number of uninsured. And it effectively eliminates protection for Americans with pre-existing conditions.

[E]veryone, who knows anything about health care warns [the bill] would cause chaos.  It’s not just progressives: The American Medical Association, the insurance industry and Blue Cross/Blue Shield have all warned that markets would be destabilized and millions would lose coverage.

How many people would lose insurance? Republicans are trying to ram the bill through before the Congressional Budget Office has time to analyze it — an attempt that is in itself a violation of all previous norms, and amounts to an admission that the bill can’t bear scrutiny. But C.B.O. has analyzed other bills containing some of Graham-Cassidy’s provisions, and these previous analyses suggest that it would add more than 30 million people to the ranks of the uninsured.

Both Cassidy and Graham insist that their bill would continue to protect Americans with pre-existing conditions — a claim that will come as news to the A.M.A., Blue Cross and everyone else who has read the bill’s text.

Independent analyses find that most states would, in fact, experience serious cuts in federal aid — and everyone would face huge cuts after 2027.

So we’re looking at an incompetently drafted bill that would hurt millions of people, whose sponsors are trying to sell it with transparently false claims. How is it that this bill might nonetheless pass the Senate?

One answer is that Republicans are desperate to destroy President Barack Obama’s legacy in any way possible, no matter how many American lives they ruin in the process.

Another answer is that most Republican legislators neither know nor care about policy substance. This is especially true on health care, where they never tried to understand why Obamacare looks the way it does, or how to devise a nonvicious alternative.

I’d add that the evasions and lies we’re seeing on this bill have been standard G.O.P. operating procedure for years. The trick of converting federal programs into block grants, then pretending that this wouldn’t mean savage cuts, was central to every one of Paul Ryan’s much-hyped budgets. The trick of comparing dollar numbers over time to conceal huge benefit cuts has, as I already noted, been around since the 1990s.

In other words, Graham-Cassidy isn’t an aberration; it’s more like the distilled essence of everything wrong with modern Republicans. . . . even if the handful of Republican senators who retain some conscience block it — we’re looking at you, John McCain — the underlying sickness of the G.O.P. 

I again find myself how any one morally decent vote Republican given what the GOP has become both at the state and at the federal level.  It epitomizes moral bankruptcy and cruelty towards others.