If you’ve been following the news much, or you’ve glanced out from beneath the rock that lives on top of you, you’re probably familiar with the GOP’s absolutely rabid excitement for taking away healthcare. It’s the astonishing reality we live in that a party of our government seems to think that providing healthcare for vulnerable citizens is criminal. This couldn’t have anything to do with tearing down our first black president’s legacy, could it? Surely the GOP wouldn’t be that racist, would they?
If you have a good memory for political muckraking, you will recall Ben Carson saying that Obamacare was “worse than slavery.” There’s this insane idea on the Republican fringe that, by mandating health insurance be carried by all citizens, you are forcing doctors to work and therefore enslaving them. It should be easy for you to imagine how getting paid quite well to do the job you trained for is similar to being enslaved and worked to literal death, whipped for transgressions like seeking your freedom or learning to read, and seeing your flesh and blood sold as chattel to the highest bidder. The similarities are obvious to those inclined to seek them, I guess.
Most recently, the GOP won a dubious victory in a Texas court, where the judge ruled at the ACA was unconstitutional. Why? Well, in December 2017, the Republican-lead Congress passed a tax bill which, while giving massive monetary gifts to the party’s biggest donors, also eliminated the financial penalty for not carrying insurance. Because that penalty was ruled a tax by the U.S. Supreme Court when the ACA last met a legal challenge, it was ruled to be within the power of the Congress to enact. Congress has the power to levy taxes, you see, but that doesn’t mean they can just do whatever they want. So when the Supremes okayed the ACA’s penalty as a tax, they cleared the ACA as constitutional. But now that the tax has been removed, the law has apparently become unconstitutional, according to a Texas judge.

The judge stopped short of issuing an injunction to halt the law, and thank goodness, too. Such a ruling would have stripped healthcare from hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans in an instant, and right around the time that the annual open enrollment period has ended. So thank heaven for small blessing, it appears.
Now that this ruling has been entered, we can expect the case to be quickly elevated to the purview of the Supreme Court. And considering the court’s brand-new makeup, we don’t really know what to expect. We all got to see what Brett Kavanaugh is really like during his Senate confirmation hearing and subsequent investigation, so there’s seems to be a good chance that Brett will take some kind of spiteful tack on this ruling. Of course, simply ruling the ACA unconstitutional wouldn’t immediately invalidate everyone’s healthcare. If the ACA is punted off the field by the courts, we can expect to see the Democratic House pushing for “Medicare for all,” the most recent brain baby of the left.
The strangest part about this whole ordeal is how absolutely ecstatic Republicans seem to be about taking away people’s healthcare. It seems that they’re so pissed that a Black man was able to be president that they want to rip down his accomplishments regardless of their individual merit. I’m surprised they didn’t rename all the Post Offices that Congress named during the brief period of Democratic control at the beginning of Obama’s first term as president.

The fact is people like having healthcare. Even if they’re Republicans, they like being able to go to the doctor when they get sick. No one really likes being bankrupted by medical bills after all, and living in a society where that is permissible is largely garbage. But considering the rich are able to afford their own healthcare, Republicans are immediately skeptical of the need for affordable insurance.
Since they’ve become the party representing the Richie Riches of the world, Republicans have become dubious of basically every social program on offer. Unless, of course, it’s Social Security or Medicare. The gullible elderly is a core GOP demographic after all, and they can’t alienate them. The decrepit and stupid are pretty much the only people who can stand voting for Republicans anymore, whether or not it is in their self-interest. But with Republicans jumping up and down with joy at the possibility of taking away healthcare for a huge number of Americans, you have to wonder how long that kind of support will last. They might be the party of “I got mine, screw you,” but that kind of behavior will eventually come back to bite them. At least, in a just world, it would.
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