Nasty and stupid

On the Today programme the other day, I heard one American right-winger argue that it wasn’t enough to lose elections; they had to stop Obamacare, no matter what the chaos caused, because, as she put it, entitlements are like a drug and once you have a new bunch of addicts, you can’t remove that drug.  Many prominent right-wingers in Anglo-Saxon-heritage democracies have no qualms about deploying the most offensive of language, in this case, treating the hitherto uninsured like drug addicts.  It’s like when Moscow’s former mayor (in a troubled democracy at best) referred to homosexual people as junkies, but the former medically uninsured don’t have Stephen Fry to be their advocate (given his international gaffes, maybe no bad thing).

It illustrates the contempt the majority of Republicans have for ordinary people – 30 million ordinary people to be precise.  The crime that prevented these people from having access to non-exorbitant healthcare – either not having a job (not unusual when unemployment is above 7%) or having a pre-existing medical condition through no fault of their own.  It is not an entitlement to guarantee the provision of health to all of one’s population, it is basic civilisation.

Yet, the extreme right have made Obamacare a cause célèbre on the grounds that it is unaffordable, forcing the Democrats to fight on the Tea Party’s choice of battleground with a powerful moral argument.  The rabid right believe they just need to show enough determination, enough willingness to destroy everything, that the Democrats will cave in, like they frequently do.  The Republican extremists may have picked the wrong fight and even gerrymandered districts may not save enough of them in the 2014 blowback – as former Republican speechwriter David Frum said, shutting down the government is playing with live ammunition, defaulting on the country’s debt is playing with nuclear weapons.

What is missing in all this is that the provisions of the Affordable Care Act save money in the long-run and to the sector of the American economy whose costs are ballooning fastest.  Doctors can’t select the most expensive treatments because they are chummy with the pharmaceutical companies, nor can they keep in patients long after the latter have recovered to gat paid longer for doing little – this is not about turfing out the ill as letting the healthy return to work, another boost to the economy.  Insurance premiums therefore come down benefiting the average American overall (and their firms) and the insurance companies have 30 million new customers to who they can sell their products.  Healthcare would be even cheaper for all if Scott Brown has punctured the Democrats super-majority by winning Edward Kennedy’s vacant Senate seat in Massachusetts (he was punished in 2012, being thrown out by the electorate).  This stopped the government providing competition with all the private health companies and drive costs down further – nine-tenths of a loaf became less than half.

So, frankly, it is disingenuous for the right to argue it is unaffordable.  The Supreme Court treated it like a tax and this is essentially a tax cut for all Americans, having to pay less for their medical bills.  Shame that the Democrats don’t emphasise this, especially as the Republican extremists are hurting the US economy to the tune of $300m a day.  Trillions of dollars worth of debt can seem gargantuan but given the credit guarantees of the US government and the US dollar being the global reserve currency, the Chinese in actual fact end up paying to hold US government debt.  The USA could rack up twice it current debt before it gets into serious problems.  That is, unless it defaults on its international debt obligations.  If the Democrats blink on this, they will be broken for a generation, such will be the grassroots disillusionment.  The Republicans must, in Republican governor Bobby Jindal’s words, “stop being the stupid party.”  That starts with breaking the hold the extremists have on the leadership.