Senate Republicans want to vote yet another time to repeal and/or replace Obamacare.
There is a reason they are having so much trouble. The debate is not about Obamacare or healthcare.
It’s about returning healthcare to the forces of an unregulated, government free marketplace. It’s a fight they have been waging since the election of Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) as President in 1932.
Before FDR the American economy was controlled by money barons like Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan, and their industrial conglomerates.
Most of the country was poor. There was no middle class. We were a nation of two economic classes – rich and poor.
And then it all came crashing down in 1929 and the country fell into the Great Depression.
The Republican response under President Herbert Hoover and a Republican Congress was to do nothing. Nothing.
The market would recover, they said. The county just has to wait. Meanwhile millions of Americans stood in bread lines and moved from town to town looking for work.
By 1932 the country had had enough and elected FDR based on his pledge to give the American people a “New Deal.”
That “New Deal” was a practical way to seek economic justice. FDR, a wealthy man himself, believed it was morally wrong to let most Americans suffer while the wealthy waited for the market to start making them rich again.
During his first term Congress enacted programs such as Social Security, Food Stamps, the FDIC that gave people confidence their money would be protected if they put it in the bank again, the Civilian Conservation Core that put thousands to work, and the Federal Housing Authority that stabilized the home mortgage market by establishing a home financing system through insured mortgage loans.
Republicans hated FDR for his success and he knew it.
In a speech delivered at Madison Square Garden a few days before he was reelected to his second term he declared: “Never before in all our history have…forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me.”
And then he thundered, “I welcome their hatred.”
All these years later Republican hatred for “big” government has not diminished.
If anything, it has become more rabid, in part because Lyndon Johnson expanded the social network FDR started with Medicare and Medicaid, all of which worked together to create the Middle Class.
And that is what the debate in the Senate this week is about. Obamacare is just the latest flashpoint in the Republican drive to undo “New Deal” social programs Roosevelt and Johnson put in place.
We’ve been here before when it comes to people’s health. Before Obamacare the market was under the control of the insurance industry that set all the rules and prices.
The result was thousands of Americans having to file bankruptcy because of medical bills they could not pay, and 45,000 Americans dying each year because of the lack of affordable medical treatment (facts, not an opinions).
That is how we know the argument that a market based healthcare system is better than one run by the government is a lie. It wasn’t in the past. It won’t be in the future.
What is more, the most efficient and effective healthcare we have in this country is Medicare, also a fact, not an opinion.
But facts don’t matter to Republicans. They make themselves believe whatever they have to in order to avoid the truth.
People like me believe that a government of the people, by the people, and for the people must have a marketplace that functions the same way, especially when it comes to life and death as healthcare does.
Republicans don’t. They believe government should stay out of the market whatever the consequences.
We’ve seen what those consequences can be, which is why if Republicans do come up with enough votes to replace Obamacare, we can be sure its bad news for millions of Americans will be matched by its good news for the for-profit insurance industry.
And that is what this debate is really all about.
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