Assuming
they haven’t been vacationing on Mars for the last decade or so, every
American must be aware that it has been the relentless ambition of
Republican politicians to repeal, roll back, or weaken the Affordable
Care Act of 2010 (ACA), otherwise known as Obamacare.
ACA is a major government safety-net project alongside Social Security and Medicare. As of February 2024, 20.8 million persons were enrolled in the program,
the highest number at any one time, and since Obamacare’s passage,
almost 50 million people have received coverage at some point. The
health care program has literally been a lifesaver for countless
Americans.
Up until the culmination of their repeal efforts in
mid-2017 (at a time the GOP controlled both houses and the presidency),
when the program only survived because Sen. John McCain left treatment
for terminal cancer to vote “no,” Newsweek
“found at least 70 Republican-led attempts to repeal, modify or
otherwise curb the Affordable Care Act since its inception as law on
March 23, 2010.”
GOP attempts to wreck the program, although more sporadic since, have continued. This year, House Republicans reported a budget
that would have defunded ACA as well as Medicaid expansion while hiking
Medicare premiums and prescription drug prices. They “balanced” these
cuts with giveaways to Big Pharma and allowing insurers to sell “junk”
policies with minimal-to-no coverage.
His ostentatious religiosity is largely phony and used as a vehicle for his ambition to rise in the Republican Party.
With that history in mind, picture the surreal moment in the vice-presidential debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance, when the latter said
“Members of my family actually got private health insurance, at least,
for the first time . . . under Donald Trump’s leadership.” Vance said
that his family members switched from Medicaid to Obamacare between 2017
and 2021.
The Ohio senator has frequently tried to characterize
Trump’s actions while president as having preserved or stabilized ACA,
when in fact he did no such thing. Enrollments in the ACA exchange in
Ohio, where Vance’s family lived, fell during Trump’s presidency, while
the uninsured rate increased. Obamacare survived simply because
congressional Republicans couldn’t quite muster the votes to kill it,
but not for want of trying. Candidate Trump is still angling to get rid
of it, although he only has “concepts of a plan” to replace it.
How
does Vance get away with such lies? Undoubtedly for the same reason
Republicans get away with all their lies. “All politicians lie” is the
cynical American’s appraisal of the officials he or she elects, and this
is of course true to the extent that all human beings lie, or at least
shade the facts to place themselves in a favorable light. But
Republicans have catapulted the lie to another category altogether.
They
lie because they dare not reveal their actual agenda. They cannot very
well tell the general public, “We intend to kick you off your health
care and provide a huge payday to the drug companies who give us
campaign donations.” Neither could they characterize Trump’s intended
revenue policy as “We plan to get rid of income taxes for our rich
contributors and use tariffs to shift the entire tax burden onto
consumers in an extremely regressive fashion.”
Instead, they
concoct a lie that foreign countries exporting to the United States will
somehow pay the tariff that the U.S. government under Trump’s policy
would levy on the product, rather than tell the truth that the consumer
would pay it as the end user of the product. As a lie, it isn’t even
plausible, but Republicans count on the fact that the general public
doesn’t bother to fact check in real time.
As for the narrower
Republican base (the only people Republican politicians take trouble to
appeal to, aside from billionaires), they are confident they could tell
them the moon is made of green cheese and they’d believe it. All the
politicians have to do is season the concoction with a few choice
culture wars clichés and the base will swallow it like a swarm of
barracudas. They are either too uneducated, too intellectually
incurious, or too ideologically rigid to apply “critical thinking
skills” (a heuristic method which has not coincidentally been condemned by the Texas Republican Party).
The irony in this regard is that millions of Republican voters are covered by ACA,
including in Ohio, where Vance’s family lives. Hence, the Ohio
Republican has to perform his little rhetorical dance to anesthetize the
base and puzzle the rest of us. That said, there is still little doubt
that if Vance were to become part of a Trump administration presiding
over a Republican-controlled House and Senate, the GOP would take
another run at repealing Obamacare.
There is another sordid lie
laid bare by Vance’s revelation about his family’s enrollment in ACA.
The entire focus of Republicans’ culture wars obsessions over many
decades has ostensibly been the family. The family is sacred; the basic,
indivisible unit without which civilization collapses.
Big
government is reviled for allegedly usurping the responsibility of the
family to look out for one another’s needs; since the 1960s Republicans
have shed crocodile tears over welfare programs because, supposedly,
they cruelly destroyed the black family. Children are the rationale for
heaving books out of libraries; families have a right to protect their
children from becoming less ignorant and bigoted than their parents.
Vance himself has mused that no-fault divorce should be abolished
for the sake of keeping the precious family together, and his ranting
about childless cat ladies shows a similar familial obsession.
As
it turns out, it’s all another lie. Vance told us on national TV that
his own mother, and presumably other family members, too (since he used
the plural) were subsisting on Medicaid until they met the
qualifications to enroll in ACA. But all that time, JD, the erstwhile
hillbilly, had pulled himself up by the bootstraps of his buddy, Silicon Valley oligarch Peter Thiel, and made quite a handsome pile of money. It didn’t hurt that he married an attorney. His recent federal financial disclosure reveals assets between $4 million and $11 million.
Isn’t
it the Christian thing to do to help those in need, especially as they
are your own family, and even more so when they are bedeviled by
addiction and other problems?
Why did someone a good deal
wealthier than most of us abandon his own mother as a public charge on
Medicaid? And even when she got off Medicaid, couldn’t he have bought
her a health insurance policy, rather than relying on Obamacare? In his
autohagiography, Vance made sure the reader got the message that his was
a difficult, dysfunction-ridden family. But there is an answer to that.
Vance has also made sure everyone knows he is a pious Catholic of a very strict, antimodernist type,
holding that theological precepts should guide secular government (his
professed belief is responsible for his frankly idiotic opinions about
cat ladies and childless people not deserving the same voting rights as people with children).
This should of course make us wary of anyone holding such views getting
his hands on executive power; these people have already wrecked the
Supreme Court. It also suggests his ostentatious religiosity is largely
phony and used as a vehicle for his ambition to rise in the Republican
Party.
Isn’t it the Christian thing to do to help those in need,
especially as they are your own family, and even more so when they are
bedeviled by addiction and other problems? Jesus did not scorn the
beggar and the lepers. And don’t the Ten Commandments (which Republican
state governments want to make a mandatory part of the public school curriculum) tell us to “honor thy father and thy mother?”
Vance
is a 24-karat fraud, the eternal rogue in the human poker deck. How
appropriate that he is now the consort, as it were, of Donald Trump,
the pathological liar. How fitting that he rose so quickly, after a
mere two years, to the very top of the morally bankrupt party I left,
more than a dozen years ago, in disgust.