Chauncey DeVega over at Salon has a good read on why Republicans feel so justified in wrecking healthcare for millions to enrich a handful of the wealthy at the top.
The “pro-life” party has become the party of death: New research on why Republicans hate poor and sick people: New data and the health care debate reveal how Republicans feel about poor people who get sick: They deserve it.
To reduce it to the nub, their world view essentially says bad things only happen to bad people. If there’s something wrong with your life, there is something wrong with you. Quite frankly, there is no room for empathy in their world. DeVega cites findings from Pew Research that fills this out.
As with many other issues, partisan differences in views of why people are rich and poor have increased in recent years. Since 2014, the share of Republicans who say a person is rich more because they have worked harder than others has risen 12 percentage points, from 54% to 66%. Democrats’ views have shown less change.
Republicans are more likely to say the reason someone is poor generally has more to do with of a lack of effort (56%) than circumstances beyond a person’s control (32%). By 71%-19%, more Democrats say that circumstances beyond one’s control are generally more often to blame for why a person is poor. The share of Democrats who link a person being poor to a lack of effort has declined since 2014 (from 29% to 19%).
There are two things about this that work out well for the well off: they have a moral justification for selfishness, and they can tell themselves they deserve what they have because they worked harder for it than anyone else. (Which is especially risable for those who inherited their wealth or otherwise benefited from privilege.)
There are two aspects about the terrible bill that passed the House yesterday. One is that they did it to flaunt their power and grab some bragging rights. The second is that it validates their world view — giving a shit about other people goes against the way they think the world really works, and this corrects that in their eyes. DeVega quotes Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Alabama, who said this on a CNN interview:
My understanding is that [the new proposal] will allow insurance companies to require people who have higher health care costs to contribute more to the insurance pool. That helps offset all these costs, thereby reducing the cost to those people who lead good lives, they’re healthy, they’ve done the things to keep their bodies healthy. And right now, those are the people — who’ve done things the right way — that are seeing their costs skyrocketing.
Anyone who is counting on Republicans in the Senate to rein this in may be counting on a fool’s hope. These are the same Republicans who stole a Supreme Court seat, and are slow-walking any investigation into the Russian interference with our elections. The old rules are out.
Read The Whole Thing. DeVega ends with this:
There is a moral obligation to speak plainly and directly in a time of crisis. To wit: The Republican Party’s so-called health care reform is designed to kill, injure and bankrupt the poor, the sick and the weak, in order to line the pockets of the 1 percent. As Republicans have repeatedly shown, the supposed “party of life” is actually the “party of death.”
It is long overdue that the American people begin to use this more accurate language to describe the Republican Party, Donald Trump and the right-wing voters who support them. The debate about “repealing and replacing” the Affordable Care Act is not about normal political disagreement or budgetary priorities. It is about who should live and who should die and whether that should reflect how much money you have in your bank account.
For an extra bonus, Charles P. Pierce weighed in with this summation at Esquire:
Goddamn them all. Goddamn the political movement that spawned them and goddamn the political party in which that movement found a home, and goddamn the infrastructure in which their pus-bag of an ideology was allowed to fester until it splattered the plague all over the government. Goddamn anyone who believes that blind, genetic luck is a demonstration of divine design. Goddamn anyone who believes in a god who hands out disease as punishment. Goddamn anyone who stays behind the walls and dances while the plague comes back again.
