Krugman: Republican Health Care Panic

[ProSense]

Republican Health Care Panic

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Leading Republicans appear to be nerving themselves up for another round of attempted fiscal blackmail. With the end of the fiscal year looming, they aren’t offering the kinds of compromises that might produce a deal and avoid a government shutdown; instead, they’re drafting extremist legislation — bills that would, for example, cut clean-water grants by 83 percent — that has no chance of becoming law. Furthermore, they’re threatening, once again, to block any rise in the debt ceiling, a move that would damage the U.S. economy and possibly provoke a world financial crisis.

Yet even as Republican politicians seem ready to go on the offensive, there’s a palpable sense of anxiety, even despair, among conservative pundits and analysts. Better-informed people on the right seem, finally, to be facing up to a horrible truth: Health care reform, President Obama’s signature policy achievement, is probably going to work.

And the good news about Obamacare is, I’d argue, what’s driving the Republican Party’s intensified extremism. Successful health reform wouldn’t just be a victory for a president conservatives loathe, it would be an object demonstration of the falseness of right-wing ideology. So Republicans are being driven into a last, desperate effort to head this thing off at the pass.

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Over all, then, health reform will help millions of Americans who were previously either too sick or too poor to get the coverage they needed, and also offer a great deal of reassurance to millions more who currently have insurance but fear losing it; it will provide these benefits at the expense of a much smaller number of other Americans, mostly the very well off. It is, if you like, a plan to comfort the afflicted while (slightly) afflicting the comfortable...the prospect that such a plan might succeed is anathema to a party whose whole philosophy is built around doing just the opposite, of taking from the “takers” and giving to the “job creators,” known to the rest of us as the “rich.” Hence the brinkmanship.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/26/opinion/krugman-republican-health-care-panic.html

[ProSense]

1. Kick! n/t

[ProSense]

2. Another. n/t

[Scurrilous]

3. K & R

[arely staircase]

4. highly recommended

"Over all, then, health reform will help millions of Americans who were previously either too sick or too poor to get the coverage they needed, and also offer a great deal of reassurance to millions more who currently have insurance but fear losing it; it will provide these benefits at the expense of a much smaller number of other Americans, mostly the very well off. It is, if you like, a plan to comfort the afflicted while (slightly) afflicting the comfortable."

[ProSense]

8. Yes, the rich will have to pay a little more. n/t

[mountain grammy]

5. And funny how the ACA is really based on a Republican plan, and will work.

But, ah, single payer medicare for all would work even better, in my opinion.

[Berlum]

6. "an object demonstration of the falseness of right-wing ideology..."

RepubliCONS merrily worshiping their false idol:

[lark]

7. Krugman - my hero!

How I wish he were part of the government, he gets it right most of the time.

[ProSense]

9. He said he has no interest in being a government official. n/t

[lark]

13. He would never be considered and knows this.

Of course he'd say he's isn't interested.

[BumRushDaShow]

10. K&R

[freshwest]

11. Ah-ha! Another EPIC FAIL for the Repugnants.

[ProSense]

12. Yup. n/t