There are many ways in which the health care titans and their tools in the Republican Party manipulate and play upon the ignorance and fears of senior citizens and under-educated Americans. Most of its targeted base is the most vulnerable. It is older folks who are sadly, the easiest prey for utterly evil sharks and profiteers. Next up are under-educated and low information Americans. These groups provide a solid anchor in the crumbling GOP base and these supporters also happen to be Rush Limbaugh's frequent listeners.
But there is a third group and this is the one that is the most sinister and dangerous. They are not old folks who are fearful about losing their Medicare benefits. They are not the folks who are honestly confused about what health care reform will mean for them. As Paul Krugman wrote in his article The Town Hall Mob today.
Now, people who don't know that Medicare is a government program probably aren't reacting to what President Obama is actually proposing. They may believe some of the disinformation opponents of health care reform are spreading, like the claim that the Obama plan will lead to euthanasia for the elderly. (That particular claim is coming straight from House Republican leaders.) But they're probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing, or even to what they've heard about what he's doing, than to who he is.
That is, the driving force behind the town hall mobs is probably the same cultural and racial anxiety that's behind the "birther" movement, which denies Mr. Obama's citizenship. Senator Dick Durbin has suggested that the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same; we don't know how many of the protesters are birthers, but it wouldn't be surprising if it's a substantial fraction.
And cynical political operators are exploiting that anxiety to further the economic interests of their backers.
Does this sound familiar? It should: it's a strategy that has played a central role in American politics ever since Richard Nixon realized that he could advance Republican fortunes by appealing to the racial fears of working-class whites.
Indeed, this is the group of folks who despise President Obama and everything he stands for. They are the ones who attended Palin's hate fests in droves. They are the ones who screamed "Kill Him!" and "Arab!" at Palin's potential lynch mob scenes. These very same sick and twisted cretins listen to every hateful word spewed from the mouths of Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and other hate mongers on the right.
The crazed racists made their forceful presence known at a town hall in Tampa yesterday.
The Republican Party has let Satan's genie out of the bottle by promoting Palin's hate rallies. No Republican official whispered a word of protest. No TV anchors uttered a word of shock or dismay about the potential for violence. The sound of silence was deafening as usual. Many of us had written to Republican lawmakers urging them to please intervene before something horrible happened. I wrote to Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison asking her to use her influence in prevailing upon Palin to ratchet down the rhetoric. Hutchison didn't bother to reply.
There is no putting the devil genie back into the bottle now. The Republicans let the evil out and now they must put an end to the town hall hate rallies. The consequences will be dire in more ways than one if the GOP fails to step up and take responsibility for a change.
The other, more normal folks who are being misinformed if not downright terrified about healthcare reform are getting the following talking points from the corporate sharks.
Myth 1: Democrats want to kill your grandmother. This claim seems too outlandish on its face to get much traction, but Republicans actually made some headway on it recently. Two House GOP leaders put out a statement warning that the healthcare reform bill "may start us down a treacherous path toward government-encouraged euthanasia."
Myth 2: The government -- i.e., you -- will have to pay for abortions. This is another way the GOP is stirring up antiabortion activists against healthcare reform -- by warning that your tax dollars will be used to pay for someone else's abortion. An ad by the Family Research Council dramatizes the issue about as creepily as possible.
Myth 3: Obama will ban all private health insurance. Allegedly, the House proposal for healthcare reform bans private insurance. This rumor comes complete with a citation: "Right there on Page 16 is a provision making individual private medical insurance illegal," the unflaggingly pro-business paper Investors Business Daily wrote in an editorial last month. Other right-wing blogs and news outlets picked up on the idea, as well. It fits in with a broader message Republicans have been using: The reform will lead to a total government takeover of healthcare.
Myth 4: The government can't possibly run a healthcare program. Opponents of reform trot out comparisons to government services frequently when they try to argue against a public, government-funded healthcare plan. Republicans drew up a chart that purports to show how convoluted the bureaucracy involved in any government plan would be. This message doesn't make Obama the enemy, it makes government inefficiency the enemy. "If you like the Post Office and the Department of Motor Vehicles and you think they're run well, just wait till you see Medicare, Medicaid and healthcare done by the government," conservative economist Arthur Laffer told CNN this week.
If that doesn't quite make sense, there's a reason -- Medicare and Medicaid are, of course, government-run healthcare programs. Medicare in particular is quite popular; polling shows some seniors are anxious that the reform will affect the care they already get from the government. (In fact, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says she frequently encounters voters who say they want to keep the government out of their Medicare.) The Department of Veterans Administration also runs a healthcare system that experts praise for its well-developed health information technology network, which lets doctors see results of tests and procedures any patient has had anywhere in the network -- eliminating the wasteful duplication that Obama says he wants to cut out of the larger healthcare world, as well.
Myth 5: Unlike private insurance, government bureaucrats will ration care. This line also makes government the enemy. "You may want healthcare that your doctor has prescribed for you," Peter Ferrara, of the anti-tax, anti-government Institute for Policy Innovation, wrote on the National Review last month. "But the rationing bureaucracy in Washington that doesn't even know you, or your doctor, may decide that your doctor doesn't know what he's talking about, or that you are too old for the government to pay for your hip replacement to stop the pain, or to get an expensive triple bypass or a pacemaker operation to save your life." Since the Obama administration keeps talking about encouraging doctors to shift to outcome-based pay scales and evidence-based guidelines for what treatments or procedures to use, opponents don't have much trouble painting a troubling picture of faceless government hacks denying the care you -- or your loved ones -- need.
Of course, there are already plenty of faceless hacks denying people care right now; they just work for private insurance companies, not the government, and they're denying care because that helps keep the insurers' profit margins up. At a recent House hearing, just three insurance companies testified that they had "rescinded" -- or dropped -- coverage for nearly 20,000 patients between 2003 and 2007, often after patients had submitted claims they thought would be covered. Even Republicans seem to know the insurance companies can be bad. "I would always rather the devil I know than the devil I don't know," House GOP boss John Boehner said last week, explaining why going after the government works even though private insurance companies would seem to be just as much of a villain.
I honestly don't know what the answer is but I think we progressives need to show up in force at the town halls so we can at least outnumber the crazies on the right. We should not taunt or aggressively engage them. It doesn't take much to push a person on the edge into violence. What we can do is to ask them to sit down and listen or leave. "If you don't want to listen, why did you come?" "Did someone ask you to attend?" "What do you do for a living?" Let's make 'em 'fess up.
Like meet Mr. Non Fringe, Normal Guy, the Pharma dude.
