GOP’S health care lies are sickening

The corruption, the hypocrisy and the mendacity that flow from the Cult of Donald Trump are so staggering as to overwhelm, exhaust and finally numb the rational mind. The depredations are mind-bending, brain-busting, head-exploding.

Let’s explore just one outrageous lie that the president and several other Republican officeholders repeat without a hint of shamelessness: that they are champions of affordable health care. This is Orwellian territory: "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." The Republican Party has dedicated itself to destroying the Affordable Care Act, broadly known as Obamacare, which allowed millions of Americans to have health insurance and provided greater protections to those who already had it.

That’s just one of the many, many reasons that the battle over the Supreme Court is supremely important. An ultraconservative high court would begin a frontal assault on every progressive ideal that has made headway in the past several decades, from voting rights to protections for gays and lesbians to reproductive rights to broader access to health care.

Conservatives have been fighting the Affordable Care Act ever since it passed with virtually no GOP votes in 2009. The refusal of Republicans to support the legislation was a clear indication not only of growing political polarization, but also of the brewing racist backlash against the tenure of the nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama. The racial animus undergirding opposition to Obamacare was obvious at the time.

The late John Lewis and a fellow Georgia congressman, David Scott, received hate mail, laced with racist invective, over their support for the legislation. A team of political scientists published a study showing that whites were more likely to support the Affordable Care Act if they believed that former President Bill Clinton had proposed the bill rather than Obama. Further, the GOP’S harsh drumbeat against it — laced with lies claiming that it mandated "death panels" for the elderly — made it unpopular among voters.

But the Republicans’ vehement denunciations and cascade of falsehoods could not compete with the lived experience of Americans, the vast majority of whom have to figure out a way to pay for at least routine doctors’ visits, if not medications and surgeries. Obamacare has no death panels, but it does make health

insurance cheaper for people whose jobs do not provide insurance benefits.

Among other things, the law offers to expand Medicaid, a program funded jointly by the states and the federal government, with the federal government picking up most of the costs. The expansion provides health care access to working-poor adults, such as menial laborers. Republican governors have largely resisted, even in poor states. But in conservative-leaning states where Democratic governors took advantage of the additional coverage, including Louisiana and Kentucky, voters approved the measure.

One of the most popular features of Obamacare is a provision that prevents health insurance companies from banning customers who have pre-existing conditions. If you lose your health insurance because you are laid off from your job, you usually have to buy your insurance on the private market. Previously, if you had, say, hypertension or diabetes, many companies would have charged you outrageously high prices. Some would have refused to sell to you for any price. Some insurance companies canceled coverage if a patient had a recurrence of cancer. Obamacare prevents all that.

The popularity of that provision is why Trump and his allies insist that they would protect those with pre-existing conditions. Recently, the president claimed that he would issue an executive order to do so. "That’s a big thing. I’ve always been very strongly in favor. This has never been done before," he said.

Wow. So many lies bundled together, so much deceit to unravel. "This" is being done now by the Affordable Care Act. And even now, Trump and his allies are trying to destroy that law. In the middle of a deadly pandemic, they are working to abolish Obamacare. In June, the Trump administration joined a legal challenge from a group of Republican state officials asking the courts to end it. That’s after Republicans in Congress have made at least 70 attempts to repeal or curb the law.

It’s easy enough to prove that Republicans are lying about their support for improved access to health insurance, including for those with pre-existing conditions. They have railed against it in Congress over and over again. Democrats just need to play the tapes.