Sabotaging Obamacare

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over

and expecting different results."

- Benjamin Franklin

For the thirty-ninth (or was it the fortieth?) time since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) became the law of the land, House Republicans voted to repeal it. Since the repeal vote would not pass in the Senate and would never be signed by the President, their vote is a symbolic and, some would say, stupid gesture. At a time when official unemployment is hovering at the 7.5% level, you would think a jobs bill would be a more effective use of their time. With the House's shenanigans and with Senate Republicans now calling for a government shutdown to effect a defunding of the ACA, the right wing nut jobs who control the Republican Party but more especially, the Republican Congressional leaders, have drawn the wrath of a leading conservative thinker. American Enterprise Institute's Norm Ornstein has called them out.

Writing in the National Journal, Ornstein calls the House and Senate Republicans' "monomaniacal focus on sabotaging the implementation of Obamacare" unprecedented and contemptible. He contrasts the Republican response to Obamacare with the way Democrats helped to smooth the implementation of George Bush's extension of prescription drug coverage to Medicare recipients. Ornstein writes:

For three years, Republicans in the Senate refused to confirm anybody to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services...to damage the possibility of a smooth rollout of the health reform plan. Guerrilla efforts to cut off funding, dozens of votes to repeal, abusive comments by leaders, attempts to discourage states from participating in Medicaid expansion or crafting exchanges, threatening letters to associations that might publicize the availability of insurance on exchanges, and now a new set of threats—to have a government shutdown, or to refuse to raise the debt ceiling, unless the president agrees to stop all funding for implementation of the plan...What is going on now to sabotage Obamacare is...sharply beneath any reasonable standards of elected officials with the fiduciary responsibility of governing.

[T]o do everything possible to undercut and destroy its implementation—which in this case means finding ways to deny coverage to many who lack any health insurance; to keep millions who might be able to get better and cheaper coverage in the dark about their new options; to create disruption for the health providers who are trying to implement the law, including insurers, hospitals, and physicians; to threaten the even greater disruption via a government shutdown or breach of the debt limit in order to blackmail the president into abandoning the law; and to hope to benefit politically from all the resulting turmoil—is simply unacceptable, even contemptible. One might expect this kind of behavior from a few grenade-throwing firebrands. That the effort is spearheaded by the Republican leaders of the House and Senate—even if Speaker John Boehner is motivated by fear of his caucus, and McConnell and Cornyn by fear of Kentucky and Texas Republican activists—takes one's breath away.

Apropos of Nothing

The US postal zip code celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. Expanded to 9 digits in 1983, the Zoning Improvement Plan was rolled out in 1963 to help in the sorting of mail, which was becoming unmanageable due to the growth in business mail.  Mr. Zip was the agent of change.

 

[Photo is from a Mental Floss webpage on zip code facts]