Fear And Loathing

Overheated rhetoric fails to live up to expectations.

by Jeffrey C. Billman

In the hours before the inelegant stagecraft that was Sunday's House of Representatives health-care reform debate, Republican Minority Leader John Boehner reportedly exhorted his caucus to "act like grownups" if the Democrats' reform package ultimately succeeded. It is a sad commentary on the state of politics that such an exhortation was necessary; it is a sadder commentary that it went unheeded.

For much of the yearlong health-care debate, House Republicans had acted like anything but: There was, of course, Rep. Joe Wilson's infamous "You lie!" during President Obama's address to Congress last year. There were the GOP top-shelfers who catered to unhinged Tea Party protesters by spouting out-and-out lies ("death panels") and bombast designed to convince them that reform somehow meant the end of civilization as they knew it.

In the run-up to the vote, things had gotten worse: Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) went on C-SPAN to defend the teabaggers who had chanted "nigger" to black members of Congress, and who had called U.S. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) a "faggot." "When you use totalitarian tactics, people begin to act crazy," he said. On the House floor, U.S. Rep Paul Broun (R-Ga.) compared health-care reform to the "Great War of Yankee Aggression." Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele labeled the effort a "hijacking of our freedom and democracy so [Democrats] can impose their socialist 'utopia.'" (Later, Steele would say that the bill's passage — approved by 219 duly elected representatives and signed by a president who earned 53 percent of the popular vote — marked "the end of representative democracy.")

But Boehner, the self-appointed grownup, seems to have wanted the drama all to himself. And so, he took to the podium and ranted like a petulant child, about process, about anger, about how democracy itself was somehow thwarted: "Shame on each and every one of you who substitutes your desires and your will above the will of your countrymen," as if all governance should be based on the latest Rasmussen poll. But even then, he couldn't keep his minions in line: As U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.) — the same guy who held the Democratic caucus hostage to his anti-choice demands — spoke Sunday night, U.S. Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) screamed at him: "Baby killer!"

Surreal, huh?

HALF OFF DEPOT

Why live life at full price?

The problem with overheated rhetoric is that it always fails to live up to the expectations it creates, and so it will here. Let's remember what this law actually does: It broadens the risk pool by requiring everyone to buy insurance (or pay a fine); it bans insurers from discriminating based on pre-existing conditions or cutting off your benefits when you get sick; it subsidizes coverage for those in the lower and middle class; it forces large employers to offer coverage and permits smaller employers to buy lower-cost plans in state-administered insurance exchanges; it closes the so-called doughnut hole in the Medicare prescription drug benefit; it pays for all of the above primarily with taxes on the wealthy and fees levied against big insurers.

That's it. No killing grandma. No government credit card for Planned Parenthood. None of that nonsense. In the end, none of the dire predictions the right wing has made will come to pass.

Many Americans, including those who took to the streets to protest the supposed communist usurpation of the American dream, will hardly notice the changes around them, because they already have access to health care, and their lives won't change all that much.

The threat will subside. And when it does, the fears of the outraged thousands who stood on the National Mall last weekend, decrying "Obamacare," waving Gadsden flags and shouting — among the assorted epithets — for lawmakers to "kill the bill," will evaporate into the ether.

It's happened before: In 1961, Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the modern GOP, famously warned that passing Medicare would mean "you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it once was like in America when men were free." Nearly a half-century later, Republicans lined up to oppose health-care reform, decrying the fact that it cuts $500 billion from Medicare, albeit in overpayments to insurance companies.

Think about that.

(jeffrey.billman@citypaper.net)