Tuesday, May 02, 2017

Republican: Sick People Don’t Deserve Affordable Care



Every now and then a Republican official will inadvertently blurt out a statement that reveals the GOP's true agenda.  In the midst of the GOP effort to repeal and "replace" Obamacare, Representative Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, performed this function and underscored the GOP's true attitude towards the poor and less fortunate when he said poor people did not deserve health care access and were a burden on others.  The others, no doubt are the wealthy to whom the GOP is trying to give a trillion dollar tax cut.   This from the party that pretends to revere "Christian values"  and which has the support of 81% of evangelical Christians.  As noted in today's earlier post, there a few more self-centered and selfish than today's Republicans and their Christofascists supporters.  They rail against abortion, yet once a child is born to a poor - or minority - family, they attitude is to simply let them die rather than part with any of their money.  The moral bankruptcy is complete.   Jonathan Chait looks at Brooks' revelation.  Here are highlights:
Republicans usually defend their health care position with an array of buzzwords like choice, patient-centric, or competition. In a CNN interview, Representative Mo Brooks, an Alabama Republican, makes the case for Trumpcare in much starker terms: it will free healthy people from having to pay the cost of the sick. “It will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool that helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy,” explained Brooks, “And right now, those are the people who have done things the right way that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.” 
It is certainly true that the Republican health care plan will spur insurance companies to charge more money to people with expensive medical needs, and less to healthier people. (It will also transfer hundreds of billions of dollars from the poor, who will get reduced Medicaid and tax credits to buy insurance, to the rich, who will receive a large tax cut.) The idea that morality dictates healthy people pay less, and sick people more, has been floating around the margins of conservative health care thought. John Mackey, the libertarian owner of Whole Foods, made this case in a 2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed denouncing Obamacare. When Democratic Senator Tom Harkin in 2010 proposed that it was time to stop segregating Americans on the basis of health status, the conservative health care analyst Jeffrey H. Anderson scoffed, “Having people pay their own way is apparently an injustice akin to segregating them by race or creed.”
Of course, you can’t pay your own way if you’re too poor or sick to afford your own projected medical costs. Indeed, sometimes people who are healthy at the moment find one day they are not, or they have a sick child, or maybe they simply want to have a baby. (The cost of bearing children is another one Republicans want to be borne entirely by those doing it.) The Republican plan expresses one of the core beliefs shared by movement conservatives, and utterly alien to people across the globe, right and left: that people who can’t afford the cost of their own medical care have nobody to blame but themselves.
When one votes Republican, this mindset and immorality is what one is voting for whether one wants to admit it or not.  To my Republican "friends" I suggest that they take a good, long look at themselves in the mirror - especially on Sunday mornings as they head to church where they will feign piety and religiosity.   Jesus would not be forgiving of such callous, selfish behavior. 

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