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Thursday, August 15, 2013

Dismiss the Organizing For Action Campaign: Affordable Care

Organizing for Action is self-described as “a nonprofit organization established to support President Obama in achieving enactment of the national agenda Americans voted for on Election Day 2012.”

Today, they’re the latest organization on my dismiss list with their new pop-ups appearing on your computer screen pleading for you to help them to, “Stop the spread of misinformation about Obamacare.” More precisely, their message is to, “Stop spreading misinformation about Obamacare, Obamacare is here to stay.”

Wow. Modifying bad laws through repeal, or amendment or judicial consideration are no longer part of our American political system? What is OFA really trying to communicate? Stop criticizing bad law it just shows that you don’t like the President. Really? Do you think most Americans are resistant to this law because they don’t like the President? The resistance is because the law, as it is, is not good in many ways.

The second part of the message arguing there’s nothing we can do, well, that’s not true, bad laws can be changed.

I think it’s time for blindly loyal democrats to start facing the fact that many of the President’s policies are half-baked attempts to establish a legacy that he expects will focus on his boldness of action instead of the incompleteness of his thought process and bad consequences of his rushes to action.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is about US, not the President, nor Congress (which exempted itself from being bound by it), nor is it about spinning the valid criticisms about the flaws and shortcomings of the law as complaints by people who don’t like the President.

What I believe we’ll discover is that the PPACA was really more about President Obama shifting, improving the lot of the poorest by decimating the middle class, creating a society in which the gap between rich and poor ultimately barely includes a middle class, which he continues to try to replace with his government middle class of civil servants.

The President may not be a bad man, but he has been and remains a persistent and significant participant in the destruction of the middle class. He is so myopically trapped in a tradition of expecting the middle class to finance the poor that he’s done more to erase the non-governmental middle class in this country than I ever remember a President doing before.

It’s time to demand from those who are pro-PPACA tell us what their insurance coverage is as the first step in identifying the validity of their opinions. It’s likely they’ll be wealthy individuals who don’t really worry about the cost of insurance, ignorant people who don’t know what the PPACA actually says, physicians getting paid incentives, insurers getting to provide less coverage for illness and its care by focusing on the cheaper checkups and such, government workers, exempt from the PPACA, or perhaps even individuals lucky enough to live in states that adopted the optional expansion of Medicaid so that they’ll get their insurance coverage for free.

The fans of the PPACA will NOT be the non-governmental middle class people, who, in spite of being lured by credits and rebates are still wise enough to recognize that it’s costing more for less coverage, or employees of companies who are paying more for less coverage, combined with this year’s increase in the amount of money you have to spend to reach the threshold for the medical deduction on your taxes which previously was anything above 7.5 percent and now is anything above 10 percent of your income.

Although it’s only 2013, we should all thankfully consider that the President isn’t here to stay as President. But that will not mean the end of the one-party rule we have today until Republicans get their acts together.

There is one argument that will always be a winner for Democrats under current Republican leadership (in addition to the one that the Republicans are basically scary with their backwards, extremist views) and that is, “It's not that they have a better idea to protect people's health.”

That’s right, they don’t, and all these years after the American people indicated that we’re not interested in what Republicans call their platform and most others consider “crazy, hateful and unreal,” Republicans belligerently delude themselves into remaining married to their dead platform.

Republican conduct regarding representing people as far as the PPACA has gone has been reprehensible. Far from reading through the text and arguing about its implications for the American people, Republicans created their own view as “being against” as their platform, preventing the American people from hearing real issues with the law BEFORE we were stuck with it.

For good reason the Republicans failed on that score. They didn’t read it. The only parts of the law with which Republicans were concerned strengthened citizen commitment to the PPACA as most Americans reeled from the hostility and scariness of Republican concerns. They showed their scary underbellies and were unable to escape their fetishism with women’s parts and reproduction , gay marriage and some old-fashioned and long-disproved idea that letting the rich do anything they want will “trickle down,” so stupid that it essentially left the Democrats where they are today, the ONLY voice that Americans hear.

Still they’re screeching, “REPEAL,” without thoughtfulness, intelligence or any ideas about protecting Americans other than playing to the most extreme elements of our society who are their tools and support the ridiculous arguments that Republicans don’t advocate government spending, that Republicans will fix the deficit by getting people off food stamps, and by renaming a governmental contract, the promise of Medicare in exchange for paying in over your working lifetime as an entitlement worth cannibalizing as a solution to problems facing America.

What’s really going on with the Democrats is that they realize that Republicans are not in the game anymore for the most part, and as long as they can still find a “CrazyClip” of a Republican saying something stupid, backwards or hostile, (which is not hard to do) the OFA is right, Obamacare is here to stay.