Four years ago, the Republican Party launched a relentless propaganda campaign to convince their low-info, Fox-befuddled followers that the coming of Obamacare was a harbinger of the Apocalypse. The motive behind the propaganda campaign had nothing to do with the substance of the reform — Pres. Obama had based the Affordable Care Act on the Republicans’ own individual mandate system that Mitt Romney had successfully rolled out when he was governor of Massachusetts — and GOPers knew that, if passed, the ACA would provide health and financial security to their own working-class and self-employed constituents, many of whom would be insured for the first time in their lives.
To Republican pols, the bankruptcies, foreclosures and untreated illnesses of their constituents were just collateral damage in their campaign to destroy Pres. Obama by killing his signature law. And so was the truth. Remember these patently ridiculous lies they floated on Fox and right-wing radio and inserted into the Congressional Record?
- Obamacare will establish “death panels” that will order euthanization for people it deems too sick to warrant treatment.
- Obamacare rations care, like systems in Canada and Great Britain.
- Obama is a socialist, nationalized health care system.
- Muslims are exempt from the law.
- Obamacare represents the largest tax increase in the history of the world.
- Obamacare will cover “illegals.”
- The IRS is going to be “in charge” of “a huge national database” on health care that will include Americans’ “personal, intimate, most close-to-the-vest-secrets.”
- Obama will allow “forced home inspections” by government agents.
- Congress is exempt from Obamacare.
All of those claims are false — not that it matters. Much of the GOP propaganda about the ACA still has currency in right-wing circles today. Bill Maher calls these myths “zombie lies.” What right-wing propagandists do, he says, “is they pass a zombie lie down to dumber and dumber people, who believe it more and more.”
That makes it exceedingly rich that the GOP is currently outraged over an assertion about the role the “stupidity of voters” played in passing the Affordable Care Act made by a consultant who worked on both the GOP prototype of Obamacare in Massachusetts in 2003 and the rollout of the ACA in 2009.
At an economists’ conference last year, the consultant, MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber, said this:
This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. If [Congressional Budget Office] scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. Okay, so it’s written to do that. In terms of risk-rated subsidies, if you had a law which said that healthy people are going to pay in — you made explicit that healthy people pay in and sick people get money — it would not have passed … Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter, or whatever, but basically that was really, really critical for the thing to pass. And it’s the second-best argument. Look, I wish Mark was right that we could make it all transparent, but I’d rather have this law than not.
Guber made a Kinsey gaffe — he inadvertently told the truth. The political messaging about the ACA bill was crafted to label the costs as “fees” not “taxes” — a fact that everyone who was following the “debate” over Obamacare knew at the time. Part of the reclassification was about trying to prevent Republicans from disparaging the bill a tax hike and part of it was related to the legalistic sausage-making required to pass the bill into law. In any case , the matter was settled two years ago when the Supreme Court ruled that the costs were, in fact, taxes.
To review: Republicans, who worked relentlessly to convince voters that Obamacare was a communist plot to legalize Nazi-style euthaniasia, are in a lather because the administration classified a fee as a tax.
This is the rankest sort of hypocrisy, especially given the fact that if it weren’t for “stupid American voters,” the Republican would not exist.
