They Shoot Healthcare, Don't They?

From The Daily Beast:

Conservatives Find Typo in Obamacare, Try to Kill People With It

Tuesday’s heartless Halbig decision, in which two judges decided that a typo strikes down a key piece of the ACA, ignores both common sense and the millions of Americans who depend on affordable health care.

It’s truly extraordinary, the lengths modern conservatism will go to to ensure that more members of what Dickens called “the surplus population” will die. First, refuse to set up state-run exchanges, so that the poor and working-class people of your state who are desperate to buy subsidized health insurance have to go to the federal exchange. Next, after your own decision not to set up an exchange has made the existence of the federal exchange necessary, you scour the Affordable Care Act and find one sentence that left out one or two words that could enable you to discredit the federal exchange.

Then you sue, claiming that the federally facilitated exchange, which exists because legislators had to plan around what they knew would be your own inaction and hostility, is illegal! Then, you get a couple of aggressively activist judges to agree with you. All that’s needed now is for John Roberts to get back on the team, and the deed will be done: Millions of people will be at risk of losing their no-longer-subsidized insurance, or see their rates shoot up to levels they simply can’t afford. And some, or many, will surely die sooner than they would have. What a legacy.

...

Any day the Right can hand Barack Obama a loss, is a good day for Conservatism. But if they can do it while ramming a hot poker through a Liberal's bleeding heart?  And immiserating millions of poor, desperate people in the process?

Well that's not just a good day.

Yowza, Yowza...that's fucking Christmas.

Hell, that's the full wingnut TurDuckEn: A War on Christmas, stuffed inside Nathan Bedford Forrest's birthday, stuffed inside Reagan Ascending Bodily to Heaven Day!

A great fucking day for American Conservatism.

The only times I remember them being this giddy was when they cheered and danced in the streets and mocked the dirty Liberal anti-war protesters after they re-elected George W. Bush in 2004...and then again in 2010 when, in full teabagger regalia and swearing they'd never even heard of George W. Bush, they cheered and danced in the streets and mocked the dirty Liberal clean up crew who were trying to clear the rubble and put out the fires that George W. Bush had left in his wake.

Oh, and there was also that 90 second interval when they creamed their collective breeches at the thought that the US Supreme Court had stripped millions of American of any hope of ever getting heath insurance:

But it was not a day of celebration here at the New Castle Driftglass.  It was not a good day at all.  My incredibly strong, smart and compassionate wife was in tears for much of the morning, for two reasons. First because we are among those millions of Americans who (as Brother Charles Pierce writes):

...have spent the last several months with a great weight lifted from their shoulders. Every ache and sudden twinge no longer felt like it could be the first step toward personal ruin. They have been able to look at their sleeping children without a familiar knot in their guts. They have been able to pursue happiness, like all of us have a right to do so, without feeling like they're running in leg shackles.

All of these people have been tossed into uncertainty -- again -- because their government has been rendered dysfunctional by a political philosophy of nihilistic vandalism, which is being judged now by a judiciary fully politicized through a long game that has extended over decades.

Or, to put it in medical terms, two months ago kindly Ol' Doc ACA metaphorically told us both that were gonna be OK.  Finally, OK.  That our labs had come back negative and that our family was no longer completely vulnerable to a quirk of fate or age or genetics which can destroy us.

We sighed, we laughed, we cried with relief, we popped a cork and got on with our lives.

And then yesterday kindly Ol' Doc ACA called us again -- out of the blue -- to tell us that he was very sorry but, someone at the lab screwed up our blood tests and...uh...we might actually be doomed after all.  

So we're frankly terrified, because this is where the metaphor breaks down.  A lab glitch would be a case of human error with a bad result: what's happening with the ACA is that a typo is being exploited by awful, awful people in order to further terrorize millions of our fellow citizens who are barely holding it together as is.

My fierce and compassionate wife also shed tears because we both happen to be supremely well equipped to patiently navigate the Kafkaesque Rube Goldberg machine that is the ACA in our home state.  We have enough patience and education and technical savvy to thread our way through the pitch-dark rejection maze that dispenses chances to buy affordable health insurance but only after scaling one mountain range after another of bureaucratic fuck ups, repeated and arbitrary denials by temp workers who have no idea what they are doing based on bad information which we never gave them, maddeningly conflicting and contradictory instructions from everyone involved and a general sense that everyone at every stage -- including janitors and interns -- have been randomly handed enormous authority to affect our lives in the most intimate ways imaginable, but that ultimately no one is in charge of anything.

We are emotionally and educationally equipped to slog though this shit all over again if we have to, but what about the millions of people who are not?   

What about people who quit after they leave their eighth unanswered message to a rejection letter because they don't know you have to call back ten times if you want to talk to a human?  Who don't know that even after they have refiled their paperwork again, its six-to-five that some temp in a hurry will round-file it because it's 4:59 and they've got someplace to be? Who are unaware that they will have to personally follow up over and over again to make sure their forms are hopping successfully across the Catch-22-strewn Frogger course on their way to Approval Land, and that each of those follow ups means making ten calls?

And it didn't have to be this way.  Even if a simple, national single-payer system is something I will not live to see, as goofy as the ACA is, it never needed to come to this.  Just like we never needed to default on our national debt obligations or let our infrastructure rot.  Just like we never had to let every madman have as many guns as he wishes or shut the government down in a fit of pique.

The father of these preventable disasters is not "our partisan system" or "these extremes on both sides".

It's the Republican Party.

Period. 

And until the Republican Party is ripped out root and branch, their battle to take away your Mom's mammograms and your Dad's cancer meds will never end. 

And once they have that, they're coming for grandma's Medicare, and Uncle Pete's Social Security. If not this year, then the next. If not this decade, then the one after that. 

Evil is very patient capital, and they have shown they are willing to shrug off failure and defeat -- shrug off iron-clad evidence of their own insanity and incompetence and fraud -- and Just. Keep. Coming. 

And until they are reduced in fact to the beset, besieged, despised and powerless minority they consonantly fantasize they are, this is going to go on and on. Their political rockets will continue to rain down pell mell on anything they can hit, because breaking the system is the agenda and chaos is the goal.

There is no point debating these people anymore because facts do not move them. 

There is no point engaging with them as rational actors or competent citizens, because they are neither.

As I have said before, this nation cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free. Like it or not, we will become all one thing, or all the other.

And the grim outlines of that struggle have never been clearer than they were this week as the Right once again danced and sang in delight at the thought of inflicting petty political damage on Barack Obama and making Liberals cry by screwing millions of their fellow Americans in the most calculatedly vicious way imaginable.  

Yowza, Yowza.