For years I’ve thought that the Republicans opposed the Affordable Care Act because it taxed their friends to pay for health insurance for people who weren’t their friends, and because it was the Democrats in general and Barack Obama in particular who got it passed into law. I’m sure there’s still a lot of truth to that, but I wonder what else is behind their loathing of the law.
Members of the Senate take an oath as follows:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter: So help me God.
Members of the House take a similar oath:
“I, AB, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion, and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.”
Granted there is nothing in either oath which says anything about protecting or caring for the population of the United States, it seem to me that’s fairly implicit. After all, the Constitution starts out with a Preamble as follows:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
“Promote the general Welfare” does the heavy lifting when it comes to the health and safety of the citizens contained within, I think.
I have a terrible time imagining a mindset which says that it’s perfectly acceptable to remove health insurance and thus health care from 22 million Americans because you don’t like the law. How can anyone justify condemning millions of people to hardship and possibly death because the process through which they get access to health care costs too much? If it costs too much, work on getting the costs down, by all means. But why is taking that access away from people (22 million people!) even considered?
How is it that one of the two major political parties in a country of 320 million people has gotten to the point of ruining 22 million of their fellow citizens’ lives in order to save the richest people in the country from paying more in taxes than they currently do?
It baffles me. Oh, sure, you can say it’s just greed and selfishness, but this is monumental greed. This is Silas Marner level greed. It’s Smaug of the Lonely Mountain level greed. The top 1% of people in this country already control more than 35% of all the wealth in the country. The next 4% control another 27%. How much more can they possibly need?
I can only conclude that the Republican party isn’t satisfied with better than half of the nation’s wealth in its and its friends’ pockets and it’s willing to beggar the middle and lower classes in this country to get more.