Taunter Media

Japanese entertainment typically leaves something to be desired, at least for those of us who are not ADD fourteen year-olds with an abiding love of epileptic seizures, but every so often it comes up with a gem of Dada absurdity.  Lady One Question, for example:

I thought of her while watching Lawrence O’Donnell try to get a straight answer out of John Culberson (R-Do You Have to Ask):

Republicans have a major problem: although Americans generally oppose taxes – especially taxes on themselves – and consider the government an evil monster, the particularly dumb and particularly afraid who form the core of the Republican voter base are especially reliant on Social Security and Medicare.  So at all costs they need to find a way to insist that they are opposed to socialism, opposed to government programs, but in favor of Social Security and Medicare.

There could be a modestly intellectually honest answer: we want people under 65 to work, we tie health care to work for people under 65 so they will do so, once you hit 65 we want you at the 4:30 dinner in Boca so we pick up your health care costs.  But think of how amazingly…dirigiste that answer sounds.  Government refusing to get better care for less money because it wants to cow the under-65s into submission in the workplace.  We sure don’t want to say that out loud.

And Social Security…well, most Americans don’t understand how the system works and are under the peculiar delusion that their FICA deductions are sitting somewhere in Fort Knox, waiting for them when they hit 65, as opposed to having been squandered in a high-stakes bingo game in the mid-70s by a previous generation who took out orders of magnitude more than it paid in.  The simple answer is that today’s workers pay for today’s retirees.  It’s not much different from a Save the Children appeal, except the elderly are not forced to write letters to the three people who support them.

So what is a good Republican to do?  Stall.  Say something completely different.  Insist on rooting out waste – never mind that the entire idea of employer-based health insurance is wasteful.  And pretend that there is some sort of world where doctors and patients have completely free reign to design treatments, despite the fact that few people have the capacity to pay for treatment at time of delivery and are therefore of necessity at the whim of the payer, whoever that might be.

Uwe Reinhardt has his eight observations about the American voter’s perspective on health care here; I’ll just give a slice:

Government should not require individuals to purchase health insurance. Such a mandate would violate the constitutional rights of freedom-loving Americans.

Americans have a moral right to life-saving and potentially highly expensive medical care, should they fall critically ill, even if they are uninsured and could not possibly pay for that care with their own financial resources. (Why else would God have created hospitals and their emergency rooms?)

So long as Republicans intend on hanging their hat on this strategy, I would suggest that the Democrats seize on the “socialized medicine” banner and wave it everywhere they go.  In any debate, ask “would you repeal Medicare?” and when the predictable denials come, then go straight for “if you support single-payer for people over 65, why don’t you support it for people under 65?”  Expect a litany of complaints about alleged Medicare underpayment, waste, etc.  Come right back: “do those flaws mean that you would like to repeal Medicare and have only voluntary private insurance for the elderly.”  More outraged denials.  “So if you support single payer with all its flaws for people over 65, why don’t you support it for people under 65?”

There is no good answer.  Even the last cry of the fiscal conservative – “we just can’t afford it” – doesn’t work.  It doesn’t work because it isn’t true – single-payer would be cheaper than private insurance – and because arguing over cost concedes the philosophical argument.  The only thing the Republicans have going for them, other than the disorganization and cowardice of the Democrats, is the vague sense by many Republican voters that they don’t trust them.  Race doesn’t help, but they didn’t like Clinton either, and he was a white, affair-having, good ol’ boy from Arkansas; it’s really about not trusting someone who just seems like a bit of a know-it-all.  Skip to 5:26 for a great description:

Once you make the debate about cost, it is incredibly hard to stop the government from doing something.  Think of TARP.  The government picked a number out of the air: $750bn, chosen by all accounts as something large, round, and under a trillion.  Once that was allocated, the reaction was not Good Lord what have we done with our debt, how will we ever pay this off, but rather hey, if the banks got $750bn, how come [insert righteous cause here] can’t even get a lousy few billion.  The gargantuan spending actually encouraged other spending, since everything else seemed small by comparison, and surely there could be no principled objection any more.

If the Democrats can convince people that they currently have government health care and it’s the health care they like, they’ll be able to get anything through Congress that they want.  If that means we end up with some weak Kent Conrad-inspired coop plan, that should tell us all we could ever need to know about what elected Democrats really want.