Charles P. Pierce A.M. Snark: "People who are not us need to have the freedom to die offstage"

[kpete]

The Neverending Assaults On The Affordable Care Act
By Charles P. Pierce at 10:15am

In case it hasn't dawned on you by now, the assault on the Affordable Care Act has absolutely nothing to do with anything except an ideological -- nay, theological -- resistance to the notion that the government (which is, I hasten to remind everyone, us) should do anything to help construct and maintain a social safety net. People who are not us need to have the freedom to die offstage. This assault simply will not stop, and anyone who thinks that the ACA eventually will "out-succeed" the attacks on it is being extraordinarily foolish. There are wealthy and powerful people in this country -- and these wealthy and powerful people have enough intellectual and political 'ho's at their disposal -- that it will not matter through the decades how well the ACA comes to work. The attempts to weaken and destroy it simply will never stop.

........................

.........it would be a capital mistake to believe that, one day, just because the law is in place and is working for people, that it then would be beyond political peril. Among the people seeking to destroy it, the fact that it was working would be the most serious indictment against it. In fact, the better it works, the more pernicious it is, and the more urgent the task of its destruction becomes. The happier They are, the weaker America becomes. The healthier They are, the less free we are. Forever and ever, amen.

the rest:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/assaults-on-affordable-care-act-will-not-stop-120313

[krispos42]

1. They're still trying to destroy Social Security 80 years after it was implemented...

...and MediCare and MedicAid 50 years later.



Some people cannot understand that "freedom" means more than being free from government. Far more.

[Scuba]

2. To wit: they're still trying to destroy Social Security.

[n2doc]

3. As posted this morning:

[rhett o rick]

4. A link to this was posted in the Progressive MR Group along with other ACA info links.

Thanks for posting.

www.democraticunderground.com/1269176

[tblue]

5. They want us running around sick

and injured, diseased, damaged, wallowing in pain and misery. That's the world they want. Everybody starving, with no shelter, in ill health, and no where/no one to turn to. If that's not the version of utopia they long for, it sure is the one they work for. Positively Dickensian.

[DirkGently]

6. It's an ugly impulse that hurts everyone.

I remember having a chatroom discussion years ago on another forum, where a self-described Libertarian was screaming that he opposed nationalized healthcare because "some homeless person would have health care as good as me!"

As though that would hurt him somehow. His accomplishments (whatever they were) would mean less, if someone else didn't suffer for not having them.

There are those studies that keep showing that given a choice between, say, making $100,000 per year in a world where everyone made that much, or $50,000 in a world where everyone else made $25,000, people like the idea of having less, but more than others, more than simply having more.

Not only that, but it's not enough for some people that those with more always HAVE more. They need to keep pushing the floor lower. It's not enough for the poor have a smaller house and cheaper food. It must be a cardboard box and not enough food.

Punching down is huge in America. It's a deliberate message pushed with the intention of keeping the middle class glaring downward, instead of up. Where the money, and the power really are.

On the upside, once social services are in place, it's hard to pull them away, because the benefits are clear, not only for those who need them most, but for everyone.

I think the ACA will lead to further health insurance reform and maybe even the single payer system we so desperately need.

[MisterP]

8. that's Heritage's whole raison d'etre

(and yet we blindly adopted their policy wholesale, and pretend it's pissing in their eye to do so)

[First Speaker]

7. I wonder what the end game of all this is going to be...

We have--as Pierce notes--a small, but very wealthy and influential group who will *always* be trying to destroy any notion of the common good. These people control one of our parties. Then there's the rest of us. "They" have been winning for at least a generation, despite the ACA. Now that it's law, they have all the energy and momentum on their side...and of course, the money. The fiasco of the ACA's start-up doesn't help us any.
As Pierce says--they will *never* give up. Sooner or later, the GOP will control all three branches of government, and they can do whatever the hell they choose. At that point, the poor and sick, which includes a growing percentage of low-level wage earners, will simply be left to die. Either there will be a revolt, which will almost certainly be crushed, or else we'll slowly evolve into a banana republic once and for all, without any further pretense of being a liberal democracy.
My guess is that a presidential election will be the tipping point, one way or another. The only time our constitutional system really broke apart was 1860, and the election of Lincoln. But it came close in 1876 and 1896. And for that matter--what if Al Gore had been someone other than who he was, in 2000? A question I ask myself quite a bit... But sooner or later, an election is going to define once and for all who we are as a country, and what we're going to become--for better or worse.