The actions of some of Obamacare’s opponents are outrageous, immoral, abhorrent, revolting. And very revealing.
The latest plunge into the cesspool is courtesy of the Koch Brothers; if you haven’t seen Creepy Uncle Same, don’t. You’ve been warned.
The disgusting ad is the latest in a series of outright lies and complete fabrications perpetrated by Koch and their fellow cesspool-dwellers on the wingnut right. Amazingly, some of their pundits seem to think this is acceptable behavior, that using a video of Uncle Sam preparing to rape a young woman is funny, appropriate, acceptable.
It is not, absolutely not.
Leave aside the minor matter that the ad is complete bullshit, and the pathological minds that would fund, create, applaud such an ad are pathetically twisted people.
Instead, ask yourself why they’d descend to such depths in an attempt to scare young people away from enrolling in health insurance.
First, it’s just stupid. Of course everyone should have health insurance.
Second, it goes directly against a fundamental conservative principle – personal responsibility. If young immortals don’t have insurance – for whatever reason – when they get sick or hurt you and I end up paying for them. That’s wrong.
Third, if Obamacare/PPACA is so bad, so fundamentally flawed, so bound to fail, why do opponents have to resort to rape scares? After all, it is based on principles laid out by the Heritage Foundation, a central pillar of the conservative movement.
And therein lies the core issue. I posit the following.
For reasons we’ve discussed here at great length, PPACA won’t “fail”, simply because it fixes the core problem with the current insurance market – Private insurers will not insure people who are likely to have health problems at anything close to affordable rates. And they shouldn’t. The “solutions” proposed by opponents are just laughable. The basic elements of the GOP’s approach – buying insurance across state lines, tort reform, meaningless tax credits, a paltry high-risk insurance pool – do nothing to address that core problem.
When it does succeed, it will blow a very large hole in what passes for current ultra-conservative theology; government is completely incompetent.
That scares the pants off Koch and their allies, the fear that personal experiences with a government-run program will be generally pretty positive; that things will work pretty well.
Oh, the horrors.
The young woman in Koch’s Creepy ad is a metaphor for the brothers’ own reaction to Obamacare; it is going to work pretty well, people will like it, and they will then become more favorably disposed to more activist public policy.