The sick motivation behind the religious right’s Obamacare sabotage

[rug]

The sick motivation behind the religious right’s Obamacare sabotage

Saturday, Dec 13, 2014 08:00 AM EST
Adam Lee, AlterNet

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, is now in its fourth year, and the numbers point to a solid success. Thanks to Obamacare, millions of people can afford health insurance for the first time, and millions more still have health insurance because now they can’t be dropped by their insurance company for getting sick. The once-astronomical growth of costs has slowed substantially, and in some markets is even decreasing.

The ACA isn’t a perfect solution, but its successes deserve to be celebrated. And they’re especially notable in light of the fact that the law has had to run (and is still facing) a gauntlet of the most ferocious opposition that’s ever confronted any major piece of legislation: a blizzard of lawsuits, filibusters, attack ads spreading ludicrous scare tactics, lockstep opposition from conservative politicians. Even now, refusenik Republicans are deliberately impeding it by refusing to set up their own state exchanges or expand Medicaid in states they control. The Republicans have tried so hard to make Obamacare fail because its success undermines their creed that government can never accomplish great things or make society a better place to live. As evidence of this, a new talking point has become the conservative refrain: that it should never have been the government’s job to aid the needy at all, and that people should instead turn to private charity, like churches, for help. For example, the Republican senator-elect from Iowa, Joni Ernst, has said:

“We have lost a reliance on not only our own families, but so much of what our churches and private organizations used to do,” she went on. “They used to have wonderful food pantries. They used to provide clothing for those that really needed it, but we have gotten away from that. Now we’re at a point where the government will just give away anything. We have to stop that.”

The same argument has been made by politicians such as (of course) Michelle Bachmann, and the writer Marvin Olasky, whose conservative classic The Tragedy of American Compassion asserted, according to Wikipedia, “that private individuals and organizations, particularly Christian churches, have a responsibility to care for the poor” and are “more effective than the government welfare programs of recent decades”. (Newt Gingrich gave copies of this book to new Republican representatives in 1992.) The libertarian author Jude Blanchette has also made this argument:

For large charities such as the Salvation Army and smaller local charities run by churches and other private organizations, the fight against poverty has been going on for the past 150 years. Tragically, standing in their way has been the federal government.[/This view, which Mike Konczal calls “the voluntarism fantasy“, is wildly ahistorical. If it were true, pre-New Deal America would have been a utopian paradise where no one ever went hungry or homeless, and where everyone’s needs were provided for by the benevolent generosity of the churches and other private charities. (The reality was much grimmer, and included such things as shantytowns dubbed “Hoovervilles” as well as hunger marches by the unemployed.)

http://www.salon.com/2014/12/13/the_sick_motivation_behind_the_religious_rights_obamacare_sabotage_partner/

[pinto]

1. Geez, there's so much mischaracterization of private and public sector contributions...

and how they both work to fill social service needs. It's mind boggling how twisted the rhetoric and actual realities at play can become at the hands of simplistic right wing, red meat talking points. And sad.