Yes, I know there was a report of a glitch in the website this morning, the last official day before ObamaCare goes into effect. And yes, I know that the President extended the sign up deadline into April. None of that matters. Not even a little bit. What you see today, March 31, and what you will see going forward as the program actually begins nationally, is a specific trend line. ObamaCare will be more popular month by month, year by year, until it is ingrained in the fabric of the United States. It is a godsend to people who are sick and uninsured. It is a cash cow to insurance companies, health providers, and eventually to doctors. It is a beautiful awkward ungainly bill that on the low end will save 40,000 lives a year, on the high end it will save hundreds of thousands of people from an ignominious death. ObamaCare, the “signature” accomplishment of President Obama – though how you can single out one accomplishment amongst the dozens that have fundamentally changed the nation – is a game changer. And yes, the GOP should be very very afraid.
The Rs have spent five years lying. Easy to do when the White House was hamstrung from punching back by a simple immutable fact – the legislation hadn’t gone into effect yet. That simple reality allowed the Machiavellian GOP just to make shit up about ObamaCare. From Death Panels, to premium shock, to a flood of discredited horror stories that were all bought and paid for or complete fabrications, the Rs have done everything in their power to stop or undermine this legislation.
It would be easy to ignore the obvious, the elephant in the room if you will, that the GOP opposition is based in a sort of classism that defines the modern party. Oligarchs – the billionaire class who build nothing, reap rewards that are largely unearned and are desperate to remain in the labor bought castles of privilege while concomitantly gutting every protection that allows the common man/woman to have a meaningful life. This hyper-privilege, this to the manner born, comes with almost no social responsibility, comes with no understanding or willingness of sacrifice and comity. There is no national pride or nationhood in billionaire robber baron greed.
More, there is no understanding that the nation works only as long as all parts have buy into the Dream. Even at the height of the Horatio Alger mythos when people didn’t have access to agency or a sense of their place in the nation, the oligarchs understood basic functional government.
Honestly I am not sure whether this generation of billionaire is simply too stupid, or too greedy to get the reality that the pendulum eventually swings both ways. That the masses will eventually rise up, that revolution, at this current level of inequality is inevitable. Maybe they don’t see it coming, even in a destabilized world where the national security of the nation rests in the hands of the very people the oligarchs seek to disenfranchise, seek to oppress, and seek to break. Somehow, I don’t see billionaires standing to post, or sacrificing their children for the continuation of America in the face of conflict.
ObamaCare is the most recent but most easily understood disconnect between the Billionaires who bought the GOP and the rest of the country. The simple understandable reality of ObamaCare is that people will live who would have died. Families will prosper who would have gone bankrupt. States with thrive who would have cracked under the catastrophic weight of medical expenditures that were Sisyphusian in their scope.
My cousin has a mind that works in mysterious ways. Years ago, during a discussion of how the GOP was imploding he called it the Medea Effect. Simply put, the GOP hates Obama more than they love America. That reality has shaped much of what has transpired in the last five years. His most recent discussion is equally brilliant, though less easily explained.
If you were going to construct an experiment of practical government, what you would do is pick three states. California, Texas, and Kentucky. You would allow them to fully buy into ObamaCare in Cali, fully reject it in Texas, and do the hybrid in Kentucky. You would let those social and political realities smash dead ahead into the functional side of government -- the implementation of ObamaCare. You would see, financially, how states thrived, 1-3-5-7 years out from the date of rejection or acceptance. Likewise, you would see how the poverty level moved, how the education level reacted, how the standard of living the quality of life, the standard of care, moved in each state. In short, you would have a perfect crucible to test the efficacy of a major program.
Because of their idiocy, the GOP has constructed this experiment. They have crafted it, creating eddies of Blue State buy in, Purple State functional necessity, and Red State obstinacy and ignorance. If they could filter out all information from the citizens of these Red States, the GOP might survive the coming Tsunami of positive ObamaCare practical participation. However, they don’t control all the information; they cannot filter all the telling and powerful stories that will affect all of us in the coming months and years.
The GOP is doomed. ObamaCare didn’t kill them, their own irrational reaction to a moderate health care proposal did. ObamaCare should have been the conservative remedy, preventing a full universal system of health care should have been their goal. But their own mania prevented them from taking the win. Their enraged, incoherent, and asinine resistance to a law that is guaranteed to be more popular day by day, week by week, month by month, dooms them.
The 2014 elections couldn’t really begin until today, until ObamaCare started. It has. ObamaCare is not a fact as well as a theory and because of the lies will fall away, and the obstruction will be so clear that the GOP will suffer for it. Today is the beginning of the end of the GOP.
Peace,
J. Christian Watts
Follow me on Twitter @JCWPolitics
Read me at Critical Blackness Blog