Dept. of Irony: GOP Flip-Flop on the Individual Mandate in 2009 Could Cost Them the Presidency in 2012

In the video clip above from the Republican presidential debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif., in June 2008, Mitt Romney defends the individual mandate as a right-wing solution to universal health care:

In 2009, the GOP propaganda machine erased the mandate’s conservative roots from the national memory banks and redefined it in the public mind as a tool of jack-booted, Kenyan socialism.

ROMNEY: [So we in Massachusetts] said: No more free riders. It was like bringing “workfare” to welfare. We said: If you can afford insurance, then either have the insurance or get a health savings account. Pay your own way, but no more free ride.

And that was what the mandate did. It said, you have got to come with either the insurance or a health savings account or the like.

I think it’s the conservative approach, to make sure that people who can afford care are getting it at their expense, not at the expense of the taxpayers and government. That I consider to be a step towards socialism.

Republicans were not only for the individual mandate before they were against it, they invented it in the 1990s. Now, of course, Romney’s enacting the mandate statewide when he was governor of Massachusetts is a contributing factor to his fading prospects in the 2012 campaign.

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Rick Scott, Famous Fighter of ‘Obamacare,’ Enrolls Himself and His Wife in Taxpayer-Paid Health Care

ScottAssinineFlorida’s tea party Republican Gov. Rick Scott has made a point to flaunt the wealth that landed him in office (instead of jail).

One of his first, likely illegal, moves was to sell the state plane that transported his predecessors while on state business. Why? Because Scott didn’t need the taxpayers’ jet, he has his own helicopter and access to his friends’ Lear Jets.

Equally played up was Scott’s decision not to accept a salary. After all, he made so many millions out of defrauding the government on padded Medicare billing in his businesses that he doesn’t need the piddly $130,000 that me and my fellow residents could provide him. Heck, Scott spent $76 million of his “own” money just to buy the office.

But there are some things that even Rick Scott needs help with. Scott, who focused his campaign and every FOX News appearance he’s ever made, on getting rid of the Affordable Healthcare Act which would provide health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans – and Floridians – is accepting our help to pay for his health insurance.

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Verbatim

What House Republicans propose is that the government simply push the problem of rising health care costs on to seniors; that is, that we replace Medicare with vouchers that can be applied to private insurance, and that we count on seniors and insurance companies to work it out somehow.

Paul Krugman, Nobel-prize winning economist, New York Times columnist, and loyal opposition leader

Remember, Private Insurance Corps Could End the Health-Care Crisis Today If They Wanted to

Shills: McConnell, left, Boehner
Shills: McConnell, left, Boehner
It is key to Republican dogma that only business, and never government, can fix society’s problems.

But one central, over-riding fact in the debate over health care always gets lost — it was lost in the 1994 debate over “Hillarycare,” and it was never addressed in the debates in 2009 and last year that resulted in the Affordable Care Act reforms.

It’s this: The huge, multi-level crisis we’re facing in health care was, in fact, created by the private health insurance companies. The failure of the private “system” that has left millions of Americans without health-care coverage is a result of policies created — not in Congress, not in an Executive Branch regulatory office — but in the executive suites of private health-insurance corporations.

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Dear Tea Party: If You Stand for Anything, You Must Demand That Your New Members of Congress Refuse Their Govt Health Coverage

photos-tea-bagger-obamacare-signs

What the tea party wants, the tea party gets — at least for now.

On Monday, the tea party spooked one of the Senate’s biggest old bulls, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, into doing a full 180 on earmarks. He has agreed to stop Republican senators from tapping funds for roads, hospitals and other projects in their states, despite the risk that comes with failing to bring home the bacon when the next elections roll around.

Why is it okay with the tea party that the politicians they voted for on Nov. 2 based on their opposition to socialist health coverage will, in February, become recipients of the same socialist coverage they were elected to oppose?

Also on Monday, tea party leaders resorted to bullying their own newly elected members of Congress — not over earmarks or anything related to policy — but rather to force them to attend a tea-party indoctrination seminar in Washington that a tea party group had inadvertently scheduled to conflict with a long-established freshman orientation session hosted by the Claremont Institute. The tea party leadership did this by publishing the members’ personal contact info in an email blast to their followers, urging the tea bagger rank and file to call the new members and browbeat them into skipping the Claremont event in favor of the tea party seminar.

(As a tactic, unleashing the mobs on your own members over a scheduling snafu smacks of political amateurism — especially when it would have been arguably easier to apologize for the mistake and reschedule the event. For one thing, bombarding members of Congress with crank calls over such a trivial matter not only risks alienating them, it uses up precious political capital. What will tea party leaders do get the members’ attention when something more important than a seminar comes up — kidnap their dogs, send letter bombs?)

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Survey USA: 77% Favor Public Option in Health-Insurance Reform

SurveyUSA conducted a poll on health-insurance reform, basing its questions word-for-word on questions in the three most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls. (The Wall Street Journal is, of course, owned by the same company that owns Fox News.)

Question 2: In any health care proposal, how important do you feel it is to give people a choice of both a public plan administered by the federal government and a private plan for their health insurance–extremely important, quite important, not that important, or not at all important?

Results:
58 percent: Extremely important
19 percent: Quite important
 7 percent: Not that important
15 percent: Not at all important
 1 percent: Not sure

What this means is that, while the GOP disinformation campaign is playing front and center on cable news, the lies at its foundation are not fooling normal Americans.

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FactCheck.org Derides Vapid Health Care Email

Even FactCheck.org has had it with the level of inanity coming from opponents to health care reform. The normally dispassionate site is addressing a ridiculous email (which so far, I haven’t gotten, praise Allah!) written by a rightwing blogger who posts the famous “Joker” picture of Obama on his home page.

It’s clear from the tone of FactCheck’s response that even they consider these lies over the top.

‘This chain e-mail shows evidence of a reading comprehension problem on the part of the author’

Our inbox has been overrun with messages asking us to weigh in on a mammoth list of claims about the House health care bill. The chain e-mail purports to give “a few highlights” from the first half of the bill, but the list of 48 assertions is filled with falsehoods, exaggerations and misinterpretations. We examined each of the e-mail’s claims, finding 26 of them to be false and 18 to be misleading, only partly true or half true. Only four are accurate…

This chain e-mail claims to give a run-down of what’s in the House health care bill, H.R. 3200. Instead, it shows evidence of a reading comprehension problem on the part of the author.

Ouch, FactCheck! But right on. We also like what they had to say about the ridiculous nod-nod-wink-wink campaign against ACORN. ACORN is an advocacy group for the poor that mainly deals with such issues as predatory lending but was portrayed as something else entirely during the last election. The misrepresentation evidently continues in the notorious email.

It claims that a section about “Community-based Home Medical Services” means “more payoffs for ACORN.” ACORN does not provide medical home services. The e-mail interprets any reference to the word “community” to be some kind of payoff for ACORN. That’s nonsense.

If you got the email, get over to FactCheck.org. Hit the “Share” icon at the top of the page and send the assessment to whoever sent you that piece of rubbish, and everyone else on their address list as well.

Poll: 86% Want Universal Coverage; 79% Want Government Option

Despite the carefully contrived optics — the cell-phone videos of deranged Tea-Baggers, Birthers and Deathers disrupting town hall meetings; the armed “right wing terrorists” posing menacingly outside the meeting halls; and signs depicting Pres. Obama as Hitler — and in spite of Republican propaganda about death panels and the rest, a new poll finds that huge majorities of American voters of all ages* remain solidly behind the Democrats’ two primary goals for health-insurance reform: insuring everyone and offering the public access to the same coverage available to elected officials, federal employees, the military and veterans:

Nearly 8 in 10 Americans support a federal health insurance plan for those who can’t afford or can’t get private insurance, but only 37 percent define “public option” correctly, a new national poll found.

The majority of people polled — 86 percent — say insurance should be available to everyone regardless of health history.

And:

…79 percent say they believe a federal government health insurance option should be available for people to buy.

*  Update: To be clear, the survey was paid for by AARP but the survey group of 1,000 Democratic, Republican and independent voters was not limited to AARP members. According to this pdf, the age range of those polled was 61 percent 49 years old and younger, and 39 percent 50 years old and older.

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Grassley Lets Call for Violence Against ‘Little Hitler’ and ‘Washington’ Stand

During the public comment period of a town hall in Iowa this week led by Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, an elderly veteran took the microphone and called for violence against the president and the United States government:

“The president of the United States, that’s who you should be concerned about. Because he’s acting like a little Hitler,” said Tom Eisenhower, a World War II veteran. “I’d take a gun to Washington if enough of you would go with me.”

Grassley — whose oath of office includes swearing fealty to the Constitution and thus the government, and who lives in Washington — pointedly did not disassociate himself from Eisenhower’s call to arms against the government. Instead, the senator responded with faint praise of Pres. Obama followed by a long, rambling spin through RNC talking points that included a laundry list of wrongs the president has perpetrated on the country in the scant seven months he’s been in office.

Among these complaints, a good many were actually perpetrated by Obama’s predecessor. In particular, it is rich that Grassley decried the “Federal Reserve dropping money out of airplanes,” when it was the Bush Administration that, in 2003, shrink-wrapped $100 bills in bundles and then flew 281 million notes weighing 363 tons — $12 billion — into Iraq, where it disappeared forever.

Sen. Grassley was the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee at the time, and never lifted a finger to investigate what is likely the biggest single-shot intra-government heist in world history.

But Grassley’s failure to distance himself from a call for destruction of the government is practically statesmanlike compared to the praise Rep. Wally Herger (R-Calif.) heaped upon a man at a town hall meeting last week who described himself as a “right-wing terrorist.”

“God bless you,” Herger responded. “There goes a great American.” Through a spokesperson, Herger has refused to apologize for endorsing terrorism.

These and other Republican pols are playing with fire. Their silence in response to calls of violence by extremists in their base is de facto assent to the threats — and their assent is now in the public record.

Frum: Seniors Are Already in Public Plan – Medicare – Govt ‘Could Kill Them All Now If It Wanted to’

A poll last week about who believes what lies about health-insurance reform proved to be a damning indictment of Fox News and of the insurance lobby’s use of the Republican Party’s propaganda machine to disinform the public about reforms.

“The thing that is so wacky about this debate is that it is already true that virtually everybody over 65 is enrolled in a public plan. The government could kill them all now if it wanted to.”
– David Frum

The NBC poll found that a whopping 75 percent of Fox viewers, versus 45 percent of the population overall, believe that Democratic reforms include provisions that would require senior citizens to be evaluated for euthanasia by “death panels.”

This lie, which was first floated by health-industry lobbyist Betsy McCaughey and Facebook blogger Sarah Palin and has been heavily promoted on Fox, has been disproved by non-partisan evaulators like Factcheck.org. And yet, like the good soldiers that they are, Republican pols and pundits have fallen in line to promote this disinformation to their followers.

The latest is Sen. John McCain (R-Maverick), who flushed away what was left of his credibility in an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” yesterday:

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