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Hissyspit

(45,788 posts)
Sun Apr 7, 2013, 10:54 PM Apr 2013

Paul Krugman in NYT on Obamacare and GOP's "Freedom" Bullshit...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/opinion/krugman-insurance-and-freedom.html

Insurance and Freedom

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Published: April 7, 2013

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It goes without saying that Republicans oppose any expansion of programs that help the less fortunate — along with tax cuts for the wealthy, such opposition is pretty much what defines modern conservatism. But they seem to be having more trouble than in the past defending their opposition without simply coming across as big meanies.

- snip -

Conservatives love, for example, to quote from a stirring speech Reagan gave in 1961, in which he warned of a grim future unless patriots took a stand. (Liz Cheney used it in a Wall Street Journal op-ed article just a few days ago.) “If you and I don’t do this,” Reagan declared, “then you and I may well spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it once was like in America when men were free.” What you might not guess from the lofty language is that “this” — the heroic act Reagan was calling on his listeners to perform — was a concerted effort to block the enactment of Medicare.

These days, conservatives make very similar arguments against Obamacare. For example, Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin has called it the “greatest assault on freedom in our lifetime.” And this kind of rhetoric matters, because when it comes to the main obstacle now remaining to more or less universal health coverage — the reluctance of Republican governors to allow the Medicaid expansion that is a key part of reform — it’s pretty much all the right has.

As I’ve already suggested, the old trick of blaming the needy for their need doesn’t seem to play the way it used to, and especially not on health care: perhaps because the experience of losing insurance is so common, Medicaid enjoys remarkably strong public support. And now that health reform is the law of the land, the economic and fiscal case for individual states to accept Medicaid expansion is overwhelming. That’s why business interests strongly support expansion just about everywhere — even in Texas. But such practical concerns can be set aside if you can successfully argue that insurance is slavery.

Of course, it isn’t. In fact, it’s hard to think of a proposition that has been more thoroughly refuted by history than the notion that social insurance undermines a free society. Almost 70 years have passed since Friedrich Hayek predicted (or at any rate was understood by his admirers to predict) that Britain’s welfare state would put the nation on the slippery slope to Stalinism; 45 years have passed since Medicare went into effect; as far as most of us can tell, freedom hasn’t died on either side of the Atlantic.

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Paul Krugman in NYT on Obamacare and GOP's "Freedom" Bullshit... (Original Post) Hissyspit Apr 2013 OP
They used to bother to claim "compassion" but that's for wimps now. Spitfire of ATJ Apr 2013 #1
"what it was like in America when men were free." Free from what? Amonester Apr 2013 #2
knr Douglas Carpenter Apr 2013 #3
We're here! GeorgeGist Apr 2013 #4

Amonester

(11,541 posts)
2. "what it was like in America when men were free." Free from what?
Mon Apr 8, 2013, 01:40 AM
Apr 2013

Free from getting bankrupt if they get sick?

awh... it's that BS'er raygun agin...

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