The Only Health Care Nightmare? Pure Spite

Paul Krugman's recent piece on the Affordable Care Act pretty much sums everything up to current status. Some choice cuts...

But wait: What about all the people who lost their policies thanks to Obamacare? The answer is that this looks more than ever like a relatively small issue hyped by right-wing propaganda. RAND finds that fewer than a million people who previously had individual insurance became uninsured — and many of those transitions, one guesses, had nothing to do with Obamacare. It’s worth noting that, so far, not one of the supposed horror stories touted in Koch-backed anti-reform advertisements has stood up to scrutiny, suggesting that real horror stories are rare.

Rare indeed. So much so that you really don't here about them much except for in the right wing blogsphere with the sole intention of increasing mouth foam.

Republicans clearly have no idea how to respond to these developments. They can’t offer any real alternative to Obamacare, because you can’t achieve the good stuff in the Affordable Care Act, like coverage for people with pre-existing medical conditions, without also including the stuff they hate, the requirement that everyone buy insurance and the subsidies that make that requirement possible. Their political strategy has been to talk vaguely about replacing reform while waiting for its inevitable collapse. And what if reform doesn’t collapse? They have no idea what to do.

This is especially true since it was their idea to begin with!

What’s amazing about this wave of rejection is that it appears to be motivated by pure spite. The federal government is prepared to pay for Medicaid expansion, so it would cost the states nothing, and would, in fact, provide an inflow of dollars. The health economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the principal architects of health reform — and normally a very mild-mannered guy — recently summed it up: The Medicaid-rejection states “are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.” Indeed.

Motivated by pure spite...one could extend that to pretty much every issue the Right whines about. They really don't have any there there...

Gruber's point really drives home how this issue ties into all the other ones that will part of this year's election. Last Wednesday, in a single committee meeting, Republicans voted against the Minimum Wage, Equal Pay, LGBT Rights, and Mine Safety. Add in a decided lack of movement on the immigration issue and the Republican party is pretty much the same one that ran behind Mitt Romney in 2012. Have they learned anything?

More importantly, do they honestly think voters aren't paying attention to this?