The search for meaning
The other day Fresh Air did a conversation with a reporter about the health insurance battle; one item jumped out at me:
DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR. I’m Dave Davies in for Terry Gross, who’s off this week. We’re talking with Sarah Kliff about the Senate health care bill. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had hoped to get it to a vote before the July 4 recess but has postponed action because he can’t get enough support for it to pass. Sarah Kliff is senior policy correspondent for Vox and co-host of its podcast “The Weeds.”
When we left off, Kliff had explained that the Congressional Budget Office found the bill would leave millions more uninsured and would increase health care costs for many Americans, especially older people. You’ve been covering this issue in Washington for a long time. You must talk to Republican staff and senators. What do they say when these questions are raised about whether people are going to end up paying a lot more and getting poorer coverage?
KLIFF: Yeah, that’s been one of the, you know, interesting and different things from covering the last health care debate, which I did. You know, back then in 2009 and 2010 when I talked to Democrats about their health care bill and asked them, you know, what’s the point of all of this, they would say, we want to increase coverage and reduce costs. It would be some variation on that line. You know, when I and my colleagues at Vox talked to Republican senators over the past few weeks and ask, you know, what’s the goal of this whole thing? We’ve heard back from multiple Republican senators. The goal is to get 51 votes. The goal is really less about policy and more about passing something.
Fucking hell.
That’s not surprising, I suppose, but it’s profoundly depressing, and horrifying. Democrats want to expand coverage; Republicans want to win. The issue is life and death, and Republicans’ goal is to win.
Yes, well, it’s not their life or death, it’s just poor people.
iknkast, it’s funny*, though, how it’s this particular bill they’re so desperate to get passed. One could almost suspect that the fact poor people will be most harmed by it might play a part in their thinking**. Now, if only I could figure out why…..
*for a completely wrong definition of ‘funny’.
** ditto for ‘thinking’.
https://www.facebook.com/144310995587370/photos/a.271728576178944.71555.144310995587370/1586464328038689/?type=3&theater
Well, Acolyte, I’ve always suspected people are wrong when they say these folks want to send us back to the 50s. In the 50s, unions were strong, there was a strong middle class, and there was a social safety net that had been put in place by the New Deal. They want us to return to the 1880s – the so-called Golden Age when business rampaged mostly unchecked, people worked for them without much protection, there were long days, poor working conditions, and children joined their parents in factories at an extremely young age, also for very little money.
Plus there was that nasty company town, where workers were paid in scrip that could only be used in company owned stores and to rent company owned houses, so the bosses got back most of what they paid out, with only a tiny output to build and ‘maintain’ death trap houses and stock poor quality product. Life was, indeed, nasty, brutish, and short for many people.