Republicans have enumerated a number of “reasons” they want to abolish ACA:
- To strengthen or preserve the ACA
- We cannot afford healthcare for all Americans – only for the wealthy ones.
- The states can provide healthcare better and cheaper
- Obamacare is in a death spiral
None of these explanations are true. We need to force the Republicans to come clean about their REAL reasons for doing something so harmful to the American people:
- To undo the signature accomplishment of President Obama, America’s first black president?
- To kill off the poors?
- To eliminate social programs to give tax breaks to the rich?
- To promote “financialization” of basic human necessities – food, water, shelter and healthcare?
- To devolve power and money back to states?
Nancy McLean has documented in her book, Democracy in Chains, a comprehensive history of the ideologies underlying this movement that seeks to destroy all of the progressive gains made in the US since the New Deal. The underlying logic is this:
- The rich and privileged view taxes spent on social welfare as theft of their wealth and redistribution to the “undeserving”.
- They want to permanently dismantle all aspects of the welfare state, and to prevent voters from being able to ever vote for social welfare programs of any kind, through disenfranchisement and nullification.
- They want to make their policies permanent and impossible to revoke.
- They want to devolve political power to the local and state levels, where local politicians can act with impunity, and without federal interference.
The purveyors of this pernicious philosophy know that they can never win if their true purpose is made public, so it is couched in carefully crafted talking points from Koch-funded thinktanks, ALEC, Faux News, and a vast network of right wing and Christian ideologues. Those lies have been repeated until they became accepted as conventional wisdom.
Republicans are willing to throw millions of Americans under the bus, to destroy one-sixth of the economy, and to do untold damage to working class citizens, for principles so repulsive that they must be hidden.
It is time for citizens, elected officials, and other stakeholders to expose the true reasons for dismantling ACA, and to have open debate about the underlying philosophies and assumptions guiding this war against the American electorate
Call your elected representatives, and those pushing ACA repeal, and ask them to engage with Republicans to expose the real reasons they want to destroy the ACA and strip Americans of healthcare coverage.
The ugly underlying premises need to be subjected to vigorous debate.