It's easy to spend time thinking about what just went wrong with the election, but honestly, we don't have that luxury. As we wring our hands and worry abut what we did wrong, republican strategists are putting their efforts toward trying to repeal health care reform. We need to head them off.
As we just saw, it doesn't matter much that what they are saying doesn't mesh with reality. If they control the message about "Obamacare," they can succeed, so it is critical that they don't control that message. The good news is that they've given us rhetoric that is perfect for using against them, if we have the guts to do it.
Republican rhetoric is full of unintentional irony. As many people (here and elsewhere) have pointed out, the "death panels" that were brought into the discussion by the right to frighten seniors away from health care reform, aren't something dreamed up by reformers, but they are a feature of for-profit health insurance. Our own NYCEve has given us countless examples of them, and the details of the misery they cause by denying care to people who need it. But somehow, those stories haven't coalesced into a narrative that the public understands--the story of for-profit insurance that "succeeds" not by providing the best care for the money spent, but by minimizing the care provided per dollar taken in. Unlike TARP or the bank bailouts, this story isn't so complicated that the public can't be made to understand it--it's actually pretty simple. The lower the percentage they spend on care, the higher their profits. Insurance companies thrive when they take in more money than they pay out for care--that's how they work. Their inefficiency (as far as money spent on care/money taken in) is intrinsic to their design, and part of how they minimize pay-outs is by employing "death panels" whose job it is to try to find ways to not pay. No one had to make them up--they have been there all the time.
One of the most effective ways to tell a story is to capitalize on one that is already known. Republicans gave us "death panels" that they knew were fiction--we should tell the story of the real ones. Before momentum builds to "repeal and replace" the modest reform that managed to squeak through, people should know the truth--death panels are real, they are part of the day-too-day operation of insurance companies, and they are much scarier than "Obamacare." We need to take 'em back.