IVF And The Faithlessness Of The GOP
Republicans desperately trying to cover their tracks are running the same play as the Supreme Court justices who lied about settled law to get confirmed so they could overturn Roe v. Wade.
When Democrats endeavored in 2009 and 2010 to reform the health-care system and extend coverage to the uninsured, they chose the path of least disruption. They left in place existing systems that cover the elderly (Medicare), workers (employer-sponsored insurance), the poor (Medicaid), and veterans (the V.A. health system), and supplemented them with a new system for uninsured people. They’d buy health plans in a new regulated marketplace, and most would qualify for significant subsidies.
Barack Obama wanted everyone else to understand that he’d embraced this approach because it would leave the other systems in place. His shorthand for explaining this was “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”
As an elevator pitch it was pretty reasonable. Directionally, it was correct. But it was not literally true for every last insured person in the country. The Affordable Care Act also imposed new regulations on insurance carriers. It eliminated a class of scammy junk plans. It required insurers to add new benefits to their existing coverage. As such, when the coverage expansion began in 2013, some already insured people didn’t get to “keep” their plans. They got shifted into comparable ones, or better ones, or had to buy new plans online, and when their cancellation notices began arriving in the mail, Republicans erupted, seemingly scandalized by Obama’s broken promise.
If you followed politics closely a decade ago, you’ll remember this episode well. And if you’re a literalist, you’d have come away from the experience thinking Republicans were committed to absolute truth in advertising. Obama’s sin was to speak categorically about something that was true in general, and Republicans treated it as unforgivable.
In reality, Republicans do not care about truth in advertising, per se.
To the contrary, they have embraced near-total faithlessness. Long gone are the days when they ran and lost on a plan to privatize Medicare—now they promise not to touch entitlements on the campaign trail, hoping to win enough power to simply break the promise. When their policies are unpopular or disruptive, they don’t even bother with Obama-style salesmanship, where policy and rhetoric at least point in the same direction. They now simply pursue a range of toxically unpopular policies, while telling voters they do not.
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If you want an object lesson in a crucial difference between the two parties, contrast Obama’s sin with the GOP’s clumsy, all-hands effort to deceive the public into thinking it’s a champion of in vitro fertilization.