Opposition to Health Care reached a fever pitch in August, and has gotten louder and nastier ever since as the prospects for a Public Option have improved, and the Republican Party has continued to collapse. But why? What is wrong with Health Care?
Bill Kristol said it best.
Passage of the...health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent...the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security. Its success would signal a rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment we have begun rolling back that idea in other areas.
But the...proposal is also a serious political threat to the Republican Party...It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.
The Clinton Health Care Plan. In 1993.
But as clear as that is about the intention to kill Health Care, the true story of the reason is worse than what Kristol says. Jon Stewart asked him on the Daily Show back in July,
Oh, Bill Kristol, are you never right?
Well, even a stopped clock, or one running backwards, has to have the right time on occasion. Although I have to give Kristol points on clearly and correctly stating Republican intent to kill Health Care, and a lot of Americans with it, he is still keeping his record intact by opposing Health Care for every single one of the wrong reasons. Well, all of the reasons are wrong, and he has embraced every one of them, both what he and other Republicans say, and what they don't say.
But before we delve into that, let's just take a moment to see how wrong he is on other issues, for the benefit of those who are not so clear on Kristol's record.
Bill Kristol's Project for the New American Century is officially over, with the Web site taken down, but its work continues at the Foreign Policy Initiative. Kristol's war in Iraq continues, and he quite loudly demanded bombing of Iran and Syria. Likewise, the Project for the Republican Future didn't go away with Newt Gingrich's departure from Congress. Kristol praised Gingrich's "Scrooge-like" (sic) policies. What matters most to us in this discussion is William Kristol: Defeating President Clinton's Health Care Proposal remains the Republican playbook today, only more so. Kristol told Bob Dole to say, in response to Clinton's 1994 State of the Union address, "There is no health care crisis," a claim still being repeated by RNC Chair Michael Steele.
If you want to understand the Teabaggers (No Taxes), the Birthers (Not our President), the Deathers (Kill Grandma Bill), the Tenthers (using the Tenth Amendment to nullify Federal laws), the Tree of Libertyers (Armed rebellion against alleged tyranny), and the rest of those determined to have no Health Care bill, you have to read all of Kristol's manifesto, and at the same time my code book. Here are some excerpts, with my comments and translations. I have also put key phrases in boldface.
To begin with, I can't explain Kristol's opposition to the public interest better than he does. Here is a fuller excerpt than we began with.
Project for a Republican Future
December 2, 1993
MEMORANDUM TO: REPUBLICAN LEADERS
FROM: WILLIAM KRISTOL
SUBJECT: Defeating President Clinton's Health Care Proposal
Wherever you see either Bill or Hillary Clinton named here, think Barack Obama and you will recognize the planned actions immediately on today's news.
What follows is the first in what will be a series of political strategy memos prepared by The Project for the Republican Future...By examining the president's own strategy and tactics, this memo suggests how Republicans might reframe the current health care debate, offer a serious alternative, and, in the process, defeat the president's plan outright.
The Project for the Republican Future was founded last month to help shape a Republican vision and advance an agenda for governing. It seeks to frame a new Republicanism by challenging not just the particulars of big-government policies, but their very premises and purposes.
Not a new theme, or a new idea, at all. What have Republicans meant by small-government policies? They will tell you that big government will destroy the American economy, American morals, and American values, and replace them with a centrally-planned Socialist economy. This is of course false from beginning to end when we take their words in their normal meanings. But that isn't how Republicans mean them. Here are the general Republican meanings of the key words, in accordance with their long-running Southern Strategy of corporatism, racism, and pandering to the Religious Right.
- Economy: Corporate profits
- Morals: Bitterly opposing abortion, gay rights, sex, drugs,...
- Values: The Family Values of rich, Southern, White Christian Right males; the rights of the unborn, but not of the born; Anti-Muslim, anti-Darwinist Crusades; and so on
- Tyranny and central planning: What they say is, the government taking over the economy, telling states how to run their own affairs, and interfering with individual liberties.
What does the Obama Administration and the "Democrat" Congress want to tell states? Regulations to prevent corporate financial shenanigans and anti-competitive behavior; tolerance; no segregation, no discrimination, no oppression, no hate crimes. They can't oppress their own Blacks, Latinos, immigrants, gays, Atheist/Darwinist/Secular Humanists, women, workers, the poor,...They can't decide who goes to what school, or eats where, or gets what jobs, or gets paid the legal wage, or can form a union...The only haven for racists that is left them is in the lily-white churches, where the First Amendment guarantees that they can believe any damn nonsense they like, and decide which of the riff-raff not to let in.
What do the Republicans want? They want the Federal government to intrude into state and private matters just as much, but on the other side, enforcing Southern White anti-Feminist Christian intolerance on the rest of us immoral, atheist, Secular Humanist Devil-worshipping death-dealing Darwinists, outside agitators, and N*****-lovers. As in the Terry Schiavo case, or the 2000 election.
It doesn't matter that Kristol doesn't say any of this. It didn't matter when Ronald Reagan, the Great Prevaricator, kicked off his Presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi that he didn't mention racism. The entire Old Confederacy knew perfectly well what had happened in the ironically-named Philadelphia.
The South is perfectly aware of what its grievances with the Yankee Union are without any outside politicians explaining it to them. Barack Obama's Health Care would go to all of the riff-raff I mentioned above. All of the lower orders, according to the racists; the unworthy and sinful according to the churches; and the parasites according to our corporate masters. You don't have to explain that to any of our enemies.
Is Bill Kristol a racist? I don't have any overt evidence that he believes Blacks or others to be genetically inferior, or that he hates them. Unlike, say, Rush Limbaugh. What I have is that he claimed, as only a racist can, that there is no problem of racism in the US, that he wishes to deny Blacks and many others the benefits that a clear majority of the population wishes to bestow upon them, and that he is talking nonsense about why while dodging these key questions. We can give him the benefit of the doubt and call him a principled racist, on the condition that the Republican principles in question do not have to make sense.
...health care is not, in fact, just another Clinton domestic policy. And the conventional political strategies Republicans have used in the past are inadequate to the task of defeating the Clinton plan outright. That must be our goal.
Simple Criticism is Insufficient. Simple, green-eyeshades criticism of the plan--on the grounds that its numbers don't add up (they don't), or that it costs too much (it does), or that it will kill jobs and disrupt the economy (it will)--is fine so far as it goes. But in the current climate, such opposition only wins concessions, not surrender.
More code. Numbers, costs, jobs, disruption—to Republicans since the advent of the Southern Strategy, they all mean Our Way of Life, Our America from the white-bread 1950s when gays were firmly in the closet, Blacks, women, immigrants and even most teenagers knew their place; and what was good for General Motors was good for America. That world is gone, and its remnants are under attack as never before.
They are right that Progressives are the enemy of that way of life, and all that they stand for, but wrong in thinking that we are their personal enemies, as our President is at pains to reassure them at every opportunity. He is not talking about Reparations, which to them would mean taking away all of the private property and corporate or personal wealth that can be traced back to slave labor. But they are scaring themselves with Reparation talk.
Thus the talk shows on Obama. "I want him to fail," says Rush Limbaugh, nominally meaning, as he himself explained, failing to create a tyranny and extract Reparations. We saw above that "tyranny" includes health care and other such social and economic programs. Limbaugh doesn't want the US to fail. He definitely does want President Obama to fail at rescuing the economy through government intervention.
Passage of the Clinton health care plan, in any form, would guarantee and likely make permanent an unprecedented federal intrusion into and disruption of the American economy--and the establishment of the largest federal entitlement program since Social Security. Its success would signal a rebirth of centralized welfare-state policy at the very moment we have begun rolling back that idea in other areas. And, not least, it would destroy the present breadth and quality of the American health care system, still the world's finest. On grounds of national policy alone, the plan should not be amended; it should be erased.
To the Left, it is simply incomprehensible that anyone can claim that the US has the best health care in the world, given the facts. But let us sift through those facts with a Right-wing mindset. The best US health care is world-class. It is the uninsured and under-insured who drag down the averages. Either bringing the top down or the bottom up would, in many minds, destroy the current system. Not the health care system, but the caste/class system for keeping the riff-raff down.
It is impossible to understand US politics without knowing the history of slavery (1619-1865), the Klan and Jim Crow (1865-1954), and Massive Resistance (from that day to this). Nominally, the issues are different between slavery, segregation, and just plain hatred, but viscerally it is all one issue. Southern Whites had the dominant position in a caste system, and Damn Yankees have taken it away from them twice, with promise of a third time. And this time, it is a damn Black Yankee coming to take it away. If Our Country is the South, then he is a damn furriner, too, but we can't say that. We have to put it that he is Kenyan, or an Arab, or whatever.
It is impossible to understand this in its turn without knowing The Theory of the Leisure Class, by Thorstein Veblen. The North reads this book's theory of Conspicuous Consumption as an indictment of the Consumer Society, but it applies equally, or perhaps even more strongly, to class and caste divisions. Anybody who is considered to be visibly superior to Blacks, from the self-proclaimed Southern Aristocracy (such as Alabama Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, whose name is synonymous with Unreconstructed Southern Rebellion) to Poor White Trash, will not willingly give that up, no matter how useless the privileges are in any practical sense.
But now we get real.
But the Clinton proposal is also a serious political threat to the Republican Party. Republicans must therefore clearly understand the political strategy implicit in the Clinton plan--and then adopt an aggressive and uncompromising counterstrategy designed to delegitimize the proposal and defeat its partisan purpose.
Because the initiative's inevitably destructive effect on American medical services will not be practically apparent for several years--no Carter-like gas lines, in other words--its passage in the short run will do nothing to hurt (and everything to help) Democratic electoral prospects in 1996. But the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse--much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for "security" on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.
Try reading "protector of Black interests" and "claims to defend Blacks by restraining government". Or Latino. Or anybody else. Which the Republicans do try to claim. Yes, we're doing this for your good, not for the corporations who (sic; Corporations are widely held to be legal persons on the Right) fund us or the racists who vote for us.
The 80-80 Split. The president intends to convince the American middle class to buy into this new government dependency by overcoming their skepticism with fear. He cannot plausibly claim that his plan will make the middle class even happier with their present care. That argument, at least, is already lost. Respondents to a mid-November CBS/New York Times poll say, by a two-to-one margin, that the Clinton plan is more likely to degrade than enhance the quality of their own medical care, and by an almost six-to-one margin that their personal medical expenses are more likely to go up under Clinton than down.
The Administration's only option, then, is singlemindedly to focus on the fears many middle-class Americans have about health care as an abstract "system" that might someday threaten them.
Right. All of this about losing your insurance, about pre-existing conditions, denying coverage, climbing costs—that's just abstract fear-mongering. It has nothing to do with the reality (well, alternate reality, or possibly the other planet that Barney Frank inquired about) where Republicans live.
The Administration's public pronouncements ignore all basic, practical questions about how their health plan will actually affect the quality and flexibility of American medical care. The president makes his pitch to the 79 percent of Americans who are inclined to agree that "the system" isn't working, hoping to freeze health care debate on the level of grand generalization about structural defects. He is on the side of the angels rhetorically--denunciations of the status quo, easy moralism about his own alternative, rosy predictions of a utopian future in which security is absolutely guaranteed. Republicans can defeat him by shifting that debate toward specific, commonsense questions about the effect of Clinton's proposed reforms on individual American citizens and their families, the vast majority of whom, again, are content with the medical services they already enjoy.
Oh, evil President, preying on the gullible by telling them the truth!
Hey, Bill, you just contradicted yourself. First 80% of Americans are happy with their health care and don't think anything is wrong, but now 79% think the system is broken.
Simultaneously content (that they have something) and in mortal fear (that they will lose it, because of bureaucrats, whether from the insurance company or the government). Which fear is greater? The one that everyone around you is telling you is true, I would guess, particularly if, by disagreeing, you would find yourself an outcast from polite society.
The Republican counterstrategy involves pursuing three distinct tasks: 1) deflating the exaggerated fears of systemic health care collapse that Democrats have encouraged;
By creating other, worse, fears, of course.
- clarifying and publicizing how the Clinton reform plan would alter and damage the quality and choice of medical treatment most Americans now take for granted; and
Same story.
- pointing out that incremental and meaningful solutions to problems of health security--solutions that do not require scrapping the current structure of American medicine and experimenting with something invented in Washington--are already available and politically within reach.
LOL.
Though the president and his surrogates deny all this, the basic building blocks of his proposal permit no other result. Republicans should insistently convey the message that mandatory health alliances and government price controls will destroy the character, quality, and inventiveness of American health care.
Hmm, yes, let's see, co-ops, triggers, an exchange that nobody qualifies for, state-by-state implementation, allowing insurance companies licensed in one state to sell in all others...what else can we invent that sounds good and doesn't harm profits? Let a hundred excuses bloom! Now that's what I call inventiveness.
As both a political and policy matter, the best counter-strategy to Clinton's offer of security requires resisting the temptation to compete with the president in a contest of radical reforms. Allaying public concerns about health security can be achieved by addressing a few basic problems directly--and without unraveling the current system. The easiest way to do that is by pursuing the short list of reforms for which there is already a national consensus. Relatively simple changes to insurance regulation, for example, can eliminate the barriers to health insurance for people with pre-existing medical conditions. The unemployed or people whose employers do not provide health insurance should be able to deduct the full cost of their premiums. The federal government could target its health spending to provide clinics in rural areas and inner cities where access to health care remains a problem. Long-overdue reforms to medical malpractice law would help lower insurance rates across the board. And a simplified, uniform insurance form would reduce paperwork, another unnecessary irritant of the current system. All these small steps would make health insurance less costly and health care easier to obtain.
Pre-existing conditions, check. Tax deductions, check. Clinics, check. Tort reform, LOL. Simplified paperwork, check. Yup, the Democrats have that covered. Also, can't be dropped for getting sick, and electronic medical records that all medical records software can read and write.
Even where national health budgeting is concerned, there exist opportunities for significant reform that do not involve Great Society-style upheaval. States might be permitted to operate Medicare and Medicaid programs through managed care, for example, rather than through now-mandated fee-for-service plans--and thereby realize huge cost savings in their own budgets. (The Democratic governor of Tennessee recently applied for, and received, the necessary waiver of federal regulations to pursue just such a reform.) In fact, there are all sorts of cumbersome and costly health care mandates and regulations now imposed on states: they should be lifted to allow governors to allocate their federal programs in the most efficient way. The potential savings from Medicare and Medicaid--the engine of our escalating federal deficit--are enormous.
Naughty, naughty, Bill, you almost gave it away there. "Great Society-style upheaval" indeed! That's anti-poverty you're talking about. Anti-discrimination. Education. Social programs!!! No, no, we can't say that those are the reasons for opposing Health Care and still sound "principled". Same as Trent Lott got into trouble for saying "these problems" at Strom Thurmond's birthday party.
Hmm, state-run managed-care in Medicaid, check. Get rid of cumbersome and conflicting regulations and have a single system, check. Yup, they're in, too, at least in some versions.
A more ambitious agenda of free-market reforms remains open for the future: medical IRAs, tax credits and vouchers for insurance, and the like.
Free Market? Wait, I've heard of that. Free Market! Competition, I remember now! Yes, that's the ticket, a robust Public Option! Wait, I'm confused. Not Milton Friedman Market Fundamentalist, Ronald Reagan Voodoo Free Markets? Free Markets regulated to enforce competition rather than to give out favors? Liberal Free Markets?!?
The first step in that process must be the unqualified political defeat of the Clinton health care proposal. Its rejection by Congress and the public would be a monumental setback for the president; and an incontestable piece of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat. Subsequent replacement of the Clinton scheme by a set of ever-more ambitious, free-market initiatives would make the coming year's health policy debate a watershed in the resurgence of a newly bold and principled Republican politics.
Those would be Newt Gingrich's initiatives and principles, right? The old Contract on America? The Permanent Republican Majority? Oh, and Bill Kristol's initiatives and principles, too. Iraq and all that. Because that worked out so well in balancing the budget, shrinking government, and protecting individual liberties, remember?
Need I say more?
Later addition: Orrin Hatch came out and said much the same thing in November 2009.
