DragonI

Opinion | Understanding Republican Cruelty

There are reasons the health insurance legislation is morally obscene.

www.nytimes.com|Paul Krugman

I won’t pretend to have a full answer, but I think there are two big drivers — actually, two big lies — behind Republican cruelty on health care and beyond.

First, the evils of the G.O.P. plan are the flip side of the virtues of Obamacare. Because Republicans spent almost the entire Obama administration railing against the imaginary horrors of the Affordable Care Act — death panels! — repealing Obamacare was bound to be their first priority.

Once the prospect of repeal became real, however, Republicans had to face the fact that Obamacare, far from being the failure they portrayed, has done what it was supposed to do: It used higher taxes on the rich to pay for a vast expansion of health coverage. Correspondingly, trying to reverse the A.C.A. means taking away health care from people who desperately need it in order to cut taxes on the rich.

So one way to understand this ugly health plan is that Republicans, through their political opportunism and dishonesty, boxed themselves into a position that makes them seem cruel and immoral — because they are.

As with Obamacare, this story began with a politically convenient lie — the pretense, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, that social safety net programs just reward lazy people who don’t want to work. And we all know which people in particular were supposed to be on the take.

Now, this was never true, and in an era of rising inequality and declining traditional industries, some of the biggest beneficiaries of these safety net programs are members of the Trump-supporting white working class. But the modern G.O.P. basically consists of career apparatchiks who live in an intellectual bubble, and those Reagan-era stereotypes still dominate their picture of struggling Americans.

If Cruz Is ‘on Obamacare,’ So Are His 2016 Rivals

www.nationaljournal.com

Cruz said Tuesday that he and his family will sign up for health insurance through the exchanges created by Obamacare, prompting plenty of ridicule from Democrats looking to paint Cruz—a staunch opponent of the health care law—as a hypocrite.

But Cruz isn't the only 2016 contender to turn to the exchanges. Sen. Rand Paul signed up when the marketplaces first opened. "It made me an unhappy person," he said at the time.

Sen. Marco Rubio also signed up for coverage through Obamacare's exchange. So did Rep. Paul Ryan. In fact, most members of Congress—yes, including the Republicans who have vowed and voted so many times to repeal the Affordable Care Act—use the exchanges.

A matcher is somebody who tries to maintain an even balance of give and take