Memo to GOP: The War Over Health Care is Over

Just like those who centuries ago refused to believe that the world wasn't flat and that the earth revolved around the Sun and not vice versa, Republicans refuse to accept the reality that the war against the Affordable Health Care Act is largely over except in their minds.  Even the Virginia Chamber of Commerce is in the process of setting up a private health insurance exchange to make up for Virginia's failure to do so because of Virginia GOP opposition to anything that relates to Barack Obama.  Meanwhile, we see Mitch McConnell lying to voters in his state about the benefits that "Obamacare" has brought to over 300,000 citizens of Kentucky.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at GOP blindness to reality.  Here are highlights:

The federal government has released new data on Medicaid enrollment showing that with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, six million Americans were added to the program’s rolls. 

That’s six million low-income people who now have health coverage, who can see a doctor when they need to and who don’t have to worry about whether an accident or an illness will send them spiraling into utter financial ruin.

The numbers reveal something else, too, something that should horrify conservatives: we’re well on our way to health-care socialism.

Okay, that’s an exaggeration. But only a slight one. And at a time when the press is realizing that Republicans are losing their taste for anti-Obamacare bloviating (more on that in a moment), it shows that Bill Kristol’s nightmare has nearly come true.

Back in 1993, Kristol wrote Republicans an enormously influential memo advising that the best approach to Bill Clinton’s health reform plan was notto do everything they could to kill it outright. If any plan managed to pass, he warned, “it will re-legitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.”

[T]here are now 64 million Americans on Medicaid and CHIP.  On top of that, there are now over 52 million seniors on Medicare. There are another 9 million veterans enrolled in the Veterans Health Service.

That’s a total of 125 million Americans getting their insurance from the federal government (or, in the case of Medicaid, a federal-state program). The current U.S. population is 318 million. That means that 39 percent of us, or just under two out of every five Americans, are recipients of government health insurance.

Conservatives, on the other hand, view this as a disaster. What they’ve only partly come to terms with is the fact that it’s going to be almost impossible for them to do anything about it. 

It’s true that Republicans appear to have realized that while the ACA remains unpopular, the idea of repealing it is even less popular. Which is why, as the November election approaches, they’ve almost stopped trying to elevate the issue. 

[M]ultiple Republican Senate candidates are now mouthing support for Obamacare’s general goals and have essentially been reduced to gibberish when trying to explain their “repeal and replace” 
stance.

[E]ven if Republicans took back the White House and both houses of Congress, moving people off their government insurance would be next to impossible.

Any Republican plan to unwind the ACA is going to run headlong into people’s fear of change and be stopped in its tracks. Are you going to push 64 million Medicaid and CHIP recipients off their current insurance and onto private plans? Are you going to move away from employer-provided coverage? Are you going to privatize Medicare?

GOP Legislators Ejoy Rolls Royce Healthcare While Blocking Medicaid Expansion

When it comes to hypocrisy, few individuals are bigger hypocrites than Virginia Republicans in the General Assembly who are blocking Medicaid expansion - something that would bring healthcare coverage to 400,000 Virginians and create 30,000 jobs.  Why the hypocrisy?  Because even as GOP legislators seek to deny access to healthcare to 400,000 Virginians they are enjoying a gold-plated, Rolls Royce healthcare plan at taxpayer expense even though they are members of an only part time legislature.  The hypocrisy parallels that Congressional Republican who seek to kill Obamacare even as they enjoy healthcare plans that the rest of us could only wish for.  The Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the hypocrisy in the Virginia Legislature.  Here are highlights:

On Monday mornings, in the ninth-floor conference room of a Main Street tower overlooking the state Capitol, lobbyists for industry, hospitals, insurance companies, physicians and regional trade groups swap intel and plot strategy in the health care fight that is paralyzing a part-time legislature with a little-known secret: full-time, gold-plated health coverage.

Gridlock is the norm in Richmond. It has been for more than a decade. Among those contributing to this almost-continuous standoff are lawmakers who get from the government what they are insisting the government shouldn’t give others: health insurance, which, among other things, paid for the weight-reduction surgery of at least one senator.

That senator, Republican John Cosgrove, makes no a secret of his bariatric surgery. But that didn’t stop Del. Joe Morrissey, D-Henrico, from making a veiled reference to it during the House debate on health care this past Thursday. Told of the comment, Cosgrove alluded to one of Morrissey’s maladies — an incurable appetite for attention: “I never brought an AK-47 on the floor of the House. We all have our weirdnesses.”

For the General Assembly, as a whole, it’s a seeming delight in dysfunction, particularly on issues touching the most lives.

For the dozen or so lobbyists who gather in the offices of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, this means their push to fully extend Obamacare here is back to the future.

The meetings — led by chamber President Barry DuVal, a former commerce secretary to a Republican governor — are a reminder of the strained relationship between business and the Republican Party. Once natural allies, they have been rent asunder by the GOP’s subservience to anti-taxers, culture warriors and tea partyers, all of whom depict the party as subordinating ordinary people to profit-obsessed oligarchs. This clash plays out in primary contests.

The chamber-led alliance is looking for ways to pry away enough Republican votes in the House of Delegates to three-peat. Having twice loosened the leadership’s grip on the rank and file over taxes, business is going for the hat trick: arguing that a health care fix subsidized with more than $2 billion from Washington can help stabilize the economy as well as the workforce.

For Manoli Loupassi of Richmond, it could be additional restrictions on Medicaid, a health care program for the poor, which has one of the lowest fraud rates in the nation at three-tenths of 1 percent. Another possible inducement for him: How all that federal money could shore up Virginia Commonwealth University’s teaching hospital, where the demands of research and education collide with those of an impoverished urban population.

Another motivation may be humiliation; that legislators will have to publicly explain extending to themselves services they deny others.

According to the state personnel office, 104 of 140 delegates and senators and 202 of their spouses and children are covered by the government’s health plan, which last year legislators closed to part-time civil services workers to save money.

Enrolled in the state program are such Republican anti-Obamacare stalwarts as House Speaker Bill Howell of Stafford County, House Whip Todd Gilbert of Shenandoah County and Appropriations Committee Chairman Chris Jones of Suffolk.

If you want to look a hypocrite in the face, look no farther than your nearest GOP member of the Virginia General Assembly.