Hardworking families and businesses footing the growing bill for health insurance have a right to know how their money is spent — whether their premiums pay for the medical care they need or big insurance bureaucracies and bloated CEO compensation. And if the companies spend more on profits, executive pay and administration than the new spending rule allows, they’ll have to directly rebate consumers the difference. This is one of the ways the Affordable Care Act makes insurance companies directly accountable to consumers, and it’s a big deal…. The Republicans will say and do anything to help their rich friends and their corporate political investors. In the world of post-shame politics, they’re the poster children — they just don’t seem to care how extreme and unconscionable their hypocrisy is, or how nakedly direct their payback to their political donors appears to be.
If you listen to Republicans, October 1st is D-Day, the day when socialism takes over the American health care system and freedom crawls off to die an ignominious death. That neither is true barely matters to those who would have us believe that the Affordable Care Act was delivered to Americans by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
The truth is that the weeping and gnashing of teeth emanating from the Right has nothing to do with health care or its availability. No, the Sturm und Drang is about protecting the status quo for the health care industry that fills their campaign coffers. It has nothing to do with what’s best for Americans and everything to do with ensuring that insurance and drug companies are allowed to continue making money hand over fist while millions of Americans go without health care and/or health insurance.
America- the home to so many who bleat incessantly about “American Exceptionalism”- is the only functional democracy that doesn’t guarantee health care to its citizens. The most power economic and military power in the world tells millions of its citizens to go pound sand if they’re poor, ill, or unemployed. THIS is the system that Republicans are willing to go to the mat to protect. The fact that many of the components of the Affordable Care Act are ideas that originated with Conservatives seems not to matter to those trafficking in lies, propaganda, disinformation, or just plain fear-mongering.
This is what American Exceptionalism looks like.
