The year was 2005, and George W. Bush had just won his first majority in a Presidential election ever. And with his 2% win over John Kerry, Bush strutted out in front of the media explaining that he now had political capital, and that he was damn sure going to spend it. Everyone with a capital R within ten city blocks of their name went on television to describe his 2% win as a mandate, Jeff Gannon jokes be damned.
Bush decided that it was time to take care of a pesky little problem that has rankled fiscal conservatives in America for over half a century. And so the President embarked on a cross-country speaking tour in order to convince people that the best way to fix Social Security was to break it up into hundreds of millions of private investment accounts. That way their money could be individually invested - because if there's any money trading hands anywhere in the world, Wall Street believes it deserves a cut. It was the first salvo in the hard line right wing dream of finally dismantling that damned infernal socialist New Deal that Roosevelt had put in place during the late thirties and early forties.
It took them almost seventy years to gather up the cajones to go after Social Security outright (long since branded as the "third rail" of American politics). And when they finally tried, they did so with their mandate President and their complacent press and their noise machine so overbearingly influential that it actually convinced people that a Vietnam War veteran knew less about military action than a Champagne Squadron AWOLer. They had proven that they could fool enough of the people enough of the time. They had their mandate. They had the attention of a still panicky nation. They were the thin red line between order and terrorist anarchy!
And they got their asses kicked over it. The attempt to gut Social Security was the first major, public defeat for the Bush Administration. So here the GOP was, so far out from the inception of the program that no one who helped to craft it was still alive, and they couldn't even put so much as a dent in it.
But if you want to understand why Republicans are flipping their shit over reforming health care (and the inclusion of a Public Option), you need look no further than Social Security. They know damn well that once a proper Public Option is in place, they will never be able to get rid of it. This is a major overhaul of a severely broken aspect of how our entire country operates – an overhaul favored by 72% of the country. And a Public Option for health care is utterly toxic for the health insurance industry as it currently exists.
Its mere existence would force the current lineup of HMOs to have to end practices like mandatory denial rates (where medical directors are expected to be able to deny a certain percentage of all claims without even knowing what those claims will entail). They'll be more reluctant to sift back through a person's medical history looking for tiny excuses to drop their coverage as soon as they fall genuinely ill (even though they had no qualms about collecting premiums when the person was healthy). It just won't be feasible to abuse their customers in pursuit of profit when any one of those customers will have an alternative that will never deny them coverage and will always charge an affordable rate.
But what scares them the most is the realization that, like Social Security, any sort of health care Public Option would become untouchable. No politician would be able to go after a program that popular because you can only buy a politician up to the point where the money matters. You couldn't get a politician to campaign on a platform of cannibalism no matter how much money you handed to him because all of the advertising in the world won't win him an election. Likewise, once public health care is available, the insurance industry understands that it'll be here to stay. And that's why they're shooting their entire wad on killing it before it becomes law.
I mean, the alternative theory is that all of the various HMOs out there are spending millions on Senators, Congressmen and advertising because they're really concerned about the average citizen. And if you believe that steaming load, I know for a fact that you've never been to the doctor for anything worse than a head cold. So brace yourself for the big push, maybe bigger than anything from the political right in terms of propaganda since the invasion of Iraq. They will fight against a Public Option to the bitter, bugger-all end because they know that once it's here, it's here to stay. They know that they've slowly created a monster of public mistrust and loathing over the past thirty-five years. And they're scared.
They should be.