On the presidential campaign trail, former President Donald Trump is, once again, promising to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act — a nebulous goal that became one of his administration’s splashiest policy failures.
“We’re going to fight for much better health care than Obamacare. Obamacare is a catastrophe,” Trump said at a campaign stop in Iowa on Jan. 6.
The perplexing revival of one of Trump’s most politically damaging crusades comes at a time when the Obama-era health law is even more popular and widely used than it was in 2017, when Trump and congressional Republicans proved unable to pass their own plan to replace it. That failed effort was a big part of why Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives in the 2018 midterms.
Despite repeated promises, Trump never presented his own Obamacare replacement. And much of what Trump’s administration actually accomplished in health care has been reversed by the Biden administration.
However much of it you have, you’ll have less. However much it costs, it will cost more.
This is, of course, if he can manage to actually implement anything, which he couldn’t last time around because he, like his GOP ilk don’t actually do anything. They don’t govern. Their whole spiel is to dismantle government (the government that serves and empowers the people and protected their interests) so private interests can take control and do whatever they please to the people, the environment, healthcare, education, etc.
They do this, mostly, by sabotaging our great public works, crying, “this is broken! We need privatized solutions that cost less!” Then they propose tax cuts, citing “evil socialist hand-outs,” the very ones feeding and housing and medicating people they will later decry as homeless, mentally-ill criminals after they cut the taxes that paid for the food and shelter programs they paid for when they consequently end. Again, they blame the so-called failures of the “liberal socialist state” while having been the cause due to endless rounds of sabotage.
They don’t want to help poor people. To them, they’re poor because they’re weak and lazy, and so they don’t deserve help. Their pain is what should motivate them to succeed, and if it doesn’t, either they haven’t felt enough misery, or they don’t deserve to succeed. They believe in “the survival of the fittest,” and will often say so outright because they don’t want to say what they’re really thinking: The poor should die.
These people really think this.
They believe it is, therefore, right to deny school children free lunches, pregnant women food subsidies, and student loan forgiveness to those struggling with debt. The concept of compassion does not exist for these people, except, perhaps, for those they know personally. For some reason, those hypocrites sense of self relation to this type of need actually seems to resonate with them.
Rarely does it make a meaningful translation to a wider understanding of the issue, however.
In the end they’re subverting democracy to take control, and the issue is too complex for most people to understand or care about long enough to care about. So they end up winning by getting away with it, especially because democratic justice is slow and fascist tearing it down is very, very fast.