Lance Mannion: Which hard-liners? Which of them isn't a hard-liner?

Mined from the notebooks. Saturday, May 13, 2017. Posted Tuesday, May 16.

I know, there are more imperative things to be mad about right now, but I have to get my venting about this out of the way before I can write about those other things…however! Even if we’re in the final days of President Trump (which I’ll believe it when I see it), the Republicans are going to still control Congress for the next two years and they don’t intend to give up their goal of making life miserable for as many of the not-rich as they can.

You probably should read the Washington Post’s story first.

This is why I don’t have much hope that the Senate will kill the AHCA or even make it less horrible.

Which hardliners are we talking about?

As far as I can tell, there are virtually nothing but hardliners in the Senate Republican caucus. What there are are three sects of hardliners. Corporatists. Populist Reactionaries, formerly known as the Tea Party types, whom, to be more accurate, we should now be calling white nationalists. And Right Wing Christians. They differ on minor matters of tradition, rituals, preferred hymns, and avowed saints and recognized prophets, but they share a basic tenet: "This is our country, we get to run it our way, and the rest of you can either go along or get out!"

There may be a few Republicans left who are temperamentally more moderate, even somewhat liberal, and in another day and age they might have acted and voted accordingly. But in our godforsaken time, for one craven or cynical reason or another, they are cowed by the hardliners and generally go along, meek and contrite.

The Christianists believe they are God's chosen. The white nationalists see themselves as the only true Americans. The corporatists think they own the place and if, by mistake or through an oversight, there are any parts of it left they don't own, well, that's easily corrected. But again, they're all in agreement on that one article of faith: This is their country.

And that belief is at the center of their plans for the future of health care.

"We get to have it and you don't."

There are three things the Republicans want to do immediately regarding health care. Cut taxes on the very rich, help insurance companies maximize profits, and screw the poor into the ground. And keep in mind, to the corporatists the poor are everybody who is not rich, to the white nationalists the poor are, you know, THOSE people, and to the Christianists the poor are sinners who have lost God's favor through their own fault and have therefore earned their just punishment of being screwed into the ground, which is to say, anybody who has ever had the bad luck to get sick or lose their job or been hit with any sort of calamity, economic, personal, or act of nature. This boils down to pretty much everybody but (they think or rather hope and pray) themselves.

In short, in one form or another, to the Republicans, just about all of us are a THEM.

And the ultimate goal of their health care plan is the same as their plan for Social Security and Medicare.

Make sure we know we are a THEM.

The main focus of anger and outrage and disbelief---How, people with good hearts wonder, can the Republicans be so cruel?---has been the Republicans’ plan to throw people with pre-existing conditions---that is anybody who has ever had the temerity to get sick or injured to a degree that cost their insurance companies real money---to the wolves. The AHCA says you can be covered. It doesn't say insurance companies have to cover you. In fact, what with the opt-outs and the waivers and the high-risk pools, it gives them implicit permission not to or to effectively not to by pricing those who need it out of the market. All insurance companies have to do is move their base of operation to a state that doesn’t require them to cover every illness and condition. Any state can opt out or ask for waivers from what essential health benefits insurance companies doing business there have to cover. States run by hard-line Republicans are going to ask for the most waivers because that will attract insurance companies to locate there and because those hard-line Republicans are Republicans---corporatists, white nationalists, and Right Wing Christians. And the corporatists, white nationalists, and Christianists agree on something else beside this being their country and we are THEM to their US.

If you can’t pay for it out of your own pocket, you shouldn’t have it, even if it is the survival of your sick child.

Few of them pass the Jimmy Kimmel test or want to.

The corporatists say, Life has winners and losers, and if you’re a loser, it’s your fault and your lookout. The white nationalists in their Tea Party mode say, Not with my tax money, you don’t! And the Christianists say, If God wanted your child to live, your child would live.

But the same thinking undergirds every aspect of their plan, for instance: their infatuation with individual health savings accounts.

Republicans talk those up like they're good for consumers. Freedom of choice. Individual responsibility. You know the routine. As if they care about consumers. Individual health savings accounts are good for banks and Wall Street investors who like to play with other people's money with no consequence when they fritter it away. What they are for consumers is a paltry rainy day fund they'll probably have to raid too often to save anything like the money they'll need to pay the premiums on anything but the crappiest policies. And really by touting them the Republicans are making the point that we're each in this alone---it's up to us to come up with the cash for whatever we need at the moment we need it, and if we can't, well, that's just too bad. We should have thought of that when we decided not to be rich and then get sick or grow old.

As things stand, Medicaid recipients are going to be screwed first and hardest. Then it’s the sick and the aging and the old. But wait until the young and healthy and temporarily childless find out they’ve fallen into a trap, that the lower-premium policies that have been sold to them across state lines cover barely more than a flu shot and that when they get sick or are injured, as will inevitably happen, or if they decide to start families, or when age starts catching up with them, they’ll be lucky to find a company that wants to sell them insurance at any price. The wolves are going to eat their arms and legs. But it won’t end there.

The AHCA contains a loophole that, if taken advantage of, will allow companies providing it to treat people with employer-based insurance like people in the individual market, and there will go automatic coverage for pre-existing conditions and coverage for most sorts of essential health care for anyone working for a company or business with a sharp-eye on the bottom line and the usual corporate contempt for employees.

Maybe---maybe---the Senate’s alternative to the AHCA as is will be less deliberately and egregiously cruel. Maybe. More likely it will just be better worded to disguise its cruelties and include provisions that seem to mitigate the most egregious cruelties, until you read the fine print or, as it will more likely happen, the rep from your insurance company reads it to you when explaining why the treatment or test or medicine you need isn’t covered under the terms of your policy. But whatever they come up with, it’s going to be as big a step down the road to the serfdom as the Republican senators think they can get away with politically right now.

By now all liberals should have given up on the notion that Obamacare is a ‘conservative” plan and therefore a Republican plan. Anyone who still thinks of it as such should read Scott Lemieux on the subject. But even if it is a plan conservatives should like, it's not a plan Republicans were ever going to like because it is a plan. If it wasn't clear before, they've made it clear in the last couple months. The ideal Republican plan is no plan. The Republican plan is to leave us to all to fend for ourselves. The Republican plan is to make us all terrified of losing our jobs, to make us afraid to stand up to the boss, to make us know who is the boss, to make us feel the boss’ power and superiority, to make us know our place and believe that we belong there. The goal is to make us see ourselves as THEM and accept that we deserve to be screwed into the ground.

It is their country, after all.