Our own Kay has been saying this for months — good to see the point getting a larger platform. Jon Chait at NYMag discusses “large lies and one big truth“:
… Amidst the vast plumes of rhetorical homages to freedom and entrepreneurship and the evils of central planning, there was but one small moment in Paul Ryan’s speech when he actually spelled out what his abstract rhetorical formulations really mean. It came when he assailed President Obama for cutting Medicare — cuts that Ryan now finds unconscionable but had proposed to maintain until a few weeks ago, but never mind — for what he called “a new entitlement we didn’t even ask for.”
This is actually true — one of the few clear truths in a speech sorely lacking them. But what does this mean?
Obama was indeed trying to turn access to health insurance into an entitlement. Ryan and his fellow Republicans have made various gestures toward the notion of some kind of plan of their own to provide access to health insurance for people who can’t afford it, but they have never been willing to devote the necessary resources. Here was Ryan actually assailing not the method but the goal, implicitly conceding his position that health insurance is not an entitlement but a nice thing everybody would like but not everybody can have, like a beach house.
The political logic embedded in Ryan’s formulation was even more telling. He dismissed the goal of providing health insurance to those who can’t afford it as something “we didn’t even ask for.” Who is “we”? We is the majority of Americans who do have health insurance. We outnumber the 50 million who don’t. They can go screw themselves. Ryan actually called Obama’s decision to cut what he deemed wasteful spending in Medicare to cover the uninsured his “coldest power play.” It is a cold power play to give medical care to people who can’t get it, and an act of compassion to take it away from them…
I have one long-time acquaintance — the only rocket scientist I know — whose complaint about the ACA is that, if the Massachusetts version is an indicator, she’s going to have to wait a little longer to get an appointment at her health-care practice. She’d never use the phrase IGMFU, even in her own mind… it’s just that she’s worked hard and been conscious about her financial planning, unlike those other uninsured people. The Republicans are working hard to convince the majority of insured voters that their own convenience outweighs the communitarian value of helping keep everybody healthy, and unfortunately it’s always easier to sell selfish.