Obamacare and Republican Chutzpah

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse et al

The best definition of the quality of audacity which is captured in the word  "chutzpah" is the man who murders his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court,  on the grounds that he is now an orphan.

This is pretty much what the Republicans have engineered with Obamacare. They murdered the only real healthcare bill which would have solved the problem of healthcare in this country--that is, a "government option" or simply put, Medicare for all.  Having cut the democrats off from that road, the only path left open was a sort of gerry rigged private insurance company scheme in which private insurance would still be purchased, but with all sorts of government requirements to be sure nearly everyone who wants to be covered can get covered, and most of it is still routed through employer provided insurance. 

And now the employers are howling, at least the employers who fancy themselves "religions" who just happen to have employees. So the Catholic church which runs a hospital which employs a thousand people, 800 of whom are Baptist or Jewish or Muslim or atheists, refuses to pay for any insurance policy which includes coverage for contraception for their non believer employees, because the Church opposes contraception on religious grounds. They don't object to hiring non Catholics as employees--they couldn't run their hospitals without them--but they object to allowing those non Catholic employees to behave like non Catholics.

Of course, what the Church is really saying is, "If you work for me, you have to follow my rules."  In the dark past, that meant that employers who felt blacks should not mingle with whites could have a rule that blacks use "colored" bathrooms at work--it was part of the employer's belief system, part of his religion, and if you wanted work at his hospital, you had to put up with that. 
But the arguments get more difficult--what if, as Justice Scalia suggested, the government responds to objections from the animal rights lobby and tells a kosher slaughterhouse it cannot kill animal by slitting their throats, as the kosher procedure demands?
The counter to this is, well there the government would be targeting the practices of one religion, not making a rule to apply to all.

But each carve out for a "religious exception" in the Affordable Care Act is simply a pathway to death by a thousand cuts, and the Republicans are gleeful in their pursuit.

None of this would have boiled up, had the Act simply said, "Okay, Medicare for all." 
Then, no employers would have a fight to pick with the government because health insurance would not longer come from employers; it would come from the government. 

But politics is the art of the possible, and a Medicare for all simply did not have the votes. 

When Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965, the American Medical Association cried "socialized medicine!" and all the right wingers cried creeping socialism, the end of Western Civilization and the first step down the swift slide to a socialist, cradle to grave welfare state, just like Britain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and all those leftist European governments which provided healthcare for their people.

Johnson signing Medicare into law 

 Now, of course,  ask any doctor what life would be like without Medicare and he or she will laugh or shudder or look blankly at you because nobody can really imagine life without Medicare. 

But here we are--the Republicans are raging because the law they bludgeoned the nation into accepting is causing an uproar because it forces the private sector into doing things it doesn't want to do, that same private sector the Republicans forced to include in the health care law.  The Republicans have maimed the program and now they complain that it is getting blood all over the fine linen. 

Oh, spare me.