With sign-ups for private insurance nearing 7 million on the final day of open enrollment for Obamacare, Republicans are once again trying to unskew the polls. While Wyoming Senator John Barrasso accused the White House of "cooking the books," Ted Cruz (R-TX) pretended the number of uninsured Americans is actually rising.
Sadly, this conservative whimpering doesn't mean the GOP's all-out war on the Affordable Care Act is over. The avalanche of court challenges continues. The 50-plus repeal votes will continue to grow. The conservative misinformation campaign about mythical "death panels" and a bogus "government takeover of health care" left millions of Americans fearful and confused—the uninsured most of all—about Obamacare. Thanks to the refusal of many Republican-led states to accept the ACA's Medicaid expansion, over 7 million red staters will needlessly remain uninsured—and thousands of them will needlessly die as a result. Many of the same GOP-dominated states are blocking the work of Obamacare "navigators," despite supporting the same federal outreach program for Medicare for over two decades.
But this most grotesque act of political sabotage since the obstruction of Brown v. Board of Education was never about "freedom" or "states' rights" or "limited government" or "the doctor-patient relationship" or "consumer-driven health care." For Republicans, it was about power, pure and simple. Now as for the past 20 years, Republicans have feared not that health care reform would fail the American people, but that it would succeed. To put it another way, conservatives have dreaded the prospect that an American public grateful for access to health care could provide Democrats with an enduring majority for years to come.
We know this with certainty, because Republicans and their right-wing cheerleaders have been telling us so for over two decades.
Continue reading about the GOP's all-out war on health care reform below the fold.
