AJ DiCintio

Healthcare: Who Are the Know-Nothings?
November 6, 2009

As Tuesday’s vote revealed, Americans are strongly devoted to individualism, one happy aspect of which is that they are possessed of an abhorrence to being told what to think, a truth that explains why people are drawing their own conclusions regarding this question:

Which Americans are behaving with anti-intellectual, hateful ignorance in the debate regarding the Obama/Pelosi/Reid healthcare bills making their way through Congress?

To answer that question, common sense folks begin by stipulating some of what is currently known about the bills, for example —

The final version will be advertised as costing $1 trillion over the next decade. However, the real cost is certain to be shockingly greater for at least two reasons.

First, Congress has never come within a million miles of correctly estimating the actual cost of any of its healthcare plans.

Second, to insure that cost estimates will be low-balled by the CBO, Democrats have put in a fiscal fix that initiates taxes for Obamacare in 2010 but waits until 2013 (conveniently one year after the Election of 2012) to gradually implement the plan.

How to pay for a program that affects 16% of the nation’s economy?

Well, Democrats claim they’ll get $400 billion from Medicare — without ever explaining to seniors and the rest of the nation how they’ll get that kind of money without reducing services, cutting services, or increasing Medicare premiums.

Democrats also tell us they’ll raise another $400 billion by increasing taxes on the rich as much as 30%, taxes that, like the Alternative Minimum Tax, will grow with inflation every year.

But a tax on the rich has never brought in the revenue projected.

Moreover, Democrats have never discussed how much these huge tax increases will suppress economic growth, cost jobs, and reduce tax receipts taken in at all levels of government.

Democratic healthcare “reform” will enormously increase the cost of Medicaid and stick the states with most of the check. However, surprise, surprise, Democrats have offered governors not a word of advice about how to come up with painless tax increases to pay the ever-increasing bill.

Democrats are also stone mute with respect to talking cost with the people of the states — especially the vast number of citizens (California, alone, includes 37 million of them) who are already thrashing up to their noses in a rapaciously menacing ocean of state debt and deficits.

Democrats propose raising taxes on healthcare providers. However, they keep conveniently mum about whether the cost will be passed on to consumers.

Worse yet, to improve the chances of getting their Federal takeover of healthcare passed, Democrats have cut so many backroom deals with so many healthcare interests that the only “interest” left to bear the burden of their plan’s cost are the elderly and the rest of We the People.

Last, but not finally, the Democratic bills exhibit a galactic-sized chutzpah that delivers two particularly vile slaps to every American’s face:

Having proudly promised to scissor $400 billion from care for the elderly, Democrats shamelessly insist that the arm of the Democratic Party called Trial Lawyer Inc. will pay not one cent toward “reforming” healthcare.

As if that isn’t enough to let ordinary Americans know where they stand in a Federally controlled healthcare system, Democrats have written their 2,000 page abomination in “legislative language” that no human (except liberal activist judges) can understand — while requiring that henceforth all health insurance policies be written in “plain language.”

Now, with just those facts presented, we can discover the reaction of the great majority of Americans to Obamacare by examining the following data. (All percentages and quotes from Rasmussen Reports, 10/23/09.)

62% of Independent voters believe “it would be better to do nothing rather than pass the current plan.” (Let’s remember that 60% represents a landslide in American politics.)

Among all voters, 66% agree that “free market competition between insurance companies will do more than government regulation to reduce healthcare costs.”

Finally, 67% of all voters concur with the following statement: “No matter how bad things are [with respect to healthcare], Congress could always make it worse.”

What has been the loudest reaction to these citizens, who have made up their minds based upon facts and a wise fear of investing power in the level of government most remote from the people?

Liberal Democratic politicians have invited the American people to join them in condemning the dissenters as an “unhinged mob” composed of “swastika” loving “evil-mongers.”

As the polling data shows, the great majority of Americans — who expect nothing more than crude, insulting, vicious stupidity from leftist retread politicians — have rejected the invitation.

But what is the reaction of Liberaldom’s non-politician intellectual giants? To answer that, we can turn to two whom liberals regard as the crème de la crème.

Thomas Friedman (NY Times) assesses the public uproar not just over healthcare but the entirety of the Obama Vision as follows:

“One of the reasons that independents and conservatives who voted for Mr. Obama have been so easily swayed against him by Fox News and people labeling him a ‘socialist’ is because he has not given voice to the truly patriotic nation-building endeavor in which he is engaged.”

There is much to analyze in that embarrassingly condescending passage. However, the most important topic demanding our analysis is this:

It serves as a metaphor for much, if not most, current liberal writing, which rejects thorough, serious, pragmatic discussion of ideas, facts, and consequences in favor of empty words, words, words, which, the public is rapidly coming to learn, are beloved by people like the Wizard of Oz and our president.

Finally, in the same liberal paper, we find Frank Rich’s simplistic description of conservative Americans who are joining with Republicans, Conservatives, Libertarians, Independents, and some Democrats to form the landslide majorities mentioned earlier.

Here is what Mr. Rich calls them:

“Stalinists...[actors in a] screwball comedy...participants [dressed] up in full ‘tea party’ drag...a wacky, paranoid cult [devoted to] right-wing ideological purity...rightists [consumed with] radical-right hysteria, seething rage, fear of minorities, [and] maniacal contempt for government...dispossessed antebellum grandees [who lament] the plight of white working-class voters...[denizens of an] alternative universe [in which] Palin [is] the great white hope.”

What is that except a despicably ironic tirade delivered by a person whose psyche accomplishes nothing but the foreshadowing of its implosion as it wildly huffs and puffs plasmatic flares of “seething rage.”

And what is the substance of that plasma except a fundamentally troubled matter of the mind compressed so white-hot by a dark force that it compels the person to fulminate incessantly against white Americans.

There is, however, some good that comes from the diatribe.

It provides us with a fitting place to stop and ask ourselves this:

With respect to Obamacare, specifically, and the Obama Vision, generally, who it is that deserves to be recognized as the nation’s modern Know-Nothings, in all their prejudiced, hypocritical, incestuous arrogance?