Why so cruel?

Modern Republicanism hurts the poor to help the rich

Republican health legislation is easy to describe: Take health insurance away from tens of millions, make it much worse and far more expensive for millions more, and use the money saved to cut taxes on the wealthy.

The puzzle is why the party is pushing such a harsh, morally indefensible agenda. Losing health coverage is a nightmare, especially if you’re older, have health problems and/or lack the financial resources to cope if illness strikes. And because Americans with those characteristics are precisely the people this legislation targets, tens of millions would soon find themselves livingthis nightmare.

Meanwhile, taxes that fall mainly on a tiny, wealthy minority would be reduced or eliminated. These cuts would be big in dollar terms but would make very little difference in their lives.

So it’s vast suffering imposed on many of our fellow citizens in order to give a handful of wealthy people some extra pocket change. And the public hates the idea: Polling shows overwhelming opposition.

This bill likely has low approval even among those who would get a significant tax cut. Warren Buffett has denounced the Senate bill as the “Relief for the Rich Act.”

Which brings me back to the question: Why would anyone want to do this?

I think there are two big drivers — two big lies — behind Republican cruelty on health care and beyond.

First, the evils of the GOP plan are the flip side of the virtues of Obamacare. Because Republicans spent almost the entire Obama administration railing against the imaginary horrors of the Affordable Care Act, repealing Obamacare was bound to be their first priority once in power.

When the prospect of repeal became real, however, Republicans had to face the fact that Obamacare, far from being the failure they portrayed, has done what it was supposed to do: It has employed higher taxes on the rich to pay for a vast expansion of health coverage. Therefore, reversing the ACA means taking away health care from people who desperately need it in order to cut taxes on the rich.

So, one way to understand this ugly health plan is that Republicans, through their opportunism and dishonesty, boxed themselves into a position that makes them seem cruel and immoral — becausethey are.

Yet that’s not the whole story, because Obamacare isn’t only one of the social insurance programs under incessant right-wing attack. Food stamps, unemployment insurance, disability benefits all get the same treatment.Why?

As with Obamacare, this story began with a politically convenient lie — the pretense, going all the way back to Ronald Reagan, that social safety net programs just reward lazy people who don’t want to work. And we all know which people in particular were supposed to be on the take.

Now, this was never true, and in an era of rising inequality and declining traditional industries, some of the biggest beneficiaries of these safety net programs are members of the Trump-supporting white working class. But the modern GOP basically consists of career apparatchiks who live in an intellectual bubble, and those Reagan-era stereotypes still dominate their picture of struggling Americans.

So, Republicans start from a sort of baseline hostility toward anything that protects families against catastrophe. In this sense, there’s nothing new about their health plan. Punishing the poor and working class, while cutting taxes on the rich, is what every major GOP policy proposal does.

So what will happen to this monstrous bill? I have no idea. Whether it passes or not, however, remember this moment. For this is what modern Republicans do; this is who they are.

Paul Krugman is a columnist for The New York Times.