(Rather than rant and rave, blame and name call, or gloat, I think making an effort to put the Republican healthcare debacle we saw last Friday in a larger context might help us find our way through this chaos. This is the first of two blogs to this end. Because they are intertwined, the second one will follow in a couple of days to allow enough time to read this one, but not too much time that you forget what it says before the next one appears.)
What highly respected journalist and former ABC anchor, Ted Koppel, said to Sean Hannity on Fix News last week summarized why the Republican Obamacare replacement bill fell under its own weight.
You probably saw it. Koppel told Hannity that he believed he was bad for America. When Hannity asked why, Koppel replied: “Because you tend to attract people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts.”
That in a nutshell is why the Republicans failed in their effort to replace Obamacare. Ideology drives Republican policy making, and demands an all or nothing attitude on everything.
That is why facts are irrelevant to them. When the CBO assessment of the Republican healthcare proposal estimated that 24 million people would lose healthcare coverage, Republicans simply rejected it. That is how ideology works.
But there is one ideological position that undergirds everything else conservatives believe. Conservative writer David Frum identified what it is in an article in The Atlantic last Saturday when he quoted Arthur Clark, his former boss at the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation. Clark wrote:
“We must choose whether America will continue to be a unique and exceptional nation organized around the principle of free enterprise or whether America will move toward European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracies, increasing income redistribution, and government-controlled corporations. These competing visions are not reconcilable.”
Protecting free enterprise is what conservatives believe in more than anything else. This is their ideological mantra that drives all their policy making, and, as Clark said, any other competing perspective is not reconcilable.
In short, the ideology of protecting the free market at all costs requires an “our way or no way” attitude.
Members of the Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives are purists on this point. That is why they took down the healthcare bill last Friday. As bad as it was, for example, it still has provisions that interfered with a free market, such as guaranteeing that people with pre-existing conditions, including pregnancy, could get insurance.
In their view the government has only one obligation to the public, to ensure that people have access to healthcare. Whether or not they get it should be controlled by a for profit insurance market.
Interestingly enough, we already know what happens when this approach prevails.
In 2009, a year before Obamacare was passed, a highly respected Harvard University study was released that documented the fact that approximately 45,000 Americans were dying annually from preventable causes because of the lack of healthcare.
At the time, liberals and conservatives both agreed that this was unacceptable, but conservatives insisted the insurance industry could and would fix it, even if the facts said they couldn’t and wouldn’t.
Liberal political leaders took a different approach. They focused on morality rather than ideology, on what the government’s moral responsibility was to people and their health. Obamacare was the result.
Republicans have been fighting against it ever since, only last week they showed the nation that they are better at criticizing than they are at governing.
That will always be true as long as ideology drives them. The last eight years are living proof that this is how Republicans function, or, more accurately, practice dysfunction.
So where do we go from here? Sadly, even tragically, we have a president who tweeted that he thinks things will be great if ObamaCare explodes.
Really? All of a sudden a magical solution will appear and his promise that everybody will have insurance at a cheaper rate than ever before will come true?
Let’s hope that more reality based thinking will go into solving the very real problems Obamacare has than that.
And as unlikely as it may seem, such thinking is possible. There are practical suggestions that can become a path to reform.
But the requirement of reality based thinking does impose one condition, that ideologues are left out of the process. If that can be done, progress can be made.
What that would look like will be our focus next time.
linnposts.com 