MikeLigalig.com

The Tea Party Republicans' Biggest Mistake: Confusing Government With Our System of Government
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
Posted: 10/10/2013 5:54 pm


Robert Reich
Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy,
University of California at Berkeley;
Author, 'Beyond Outrage'


Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama and a fierce critic of the Affordable Care Act, has just changed his tune. He now says: "My primary focus is on minimizing risk of insolvency and bankruptcy. There are many paths you can take to get there. Socialized medicine is just one of the component parts of our debt and deficits that put us at financial risk."

Translated: House Republicans are under intense pressure. A new Gallup poll shows the Republican Party now viewed favorably by only 28 percent of Americans, down from 38 percent in September. That's the lowest favorable rating measured for either party since Gallup began asking this question in 1992. The Democratic Party is viewed favorably by 43 percent, down four percentage points from last month.

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No one likes big government. If you're on the left, you worry about the military-industrial-congressional complex that's spending zillions of dollars creating new weapons of mass destruction, spying on Americans, and killing innocents abroad. And you don't like government interfering in your sex life, telling you how and when you can have an abortion, whom you can marry. If you're on the right, you worry about taxes and regulations stifling innovation, out-of-control bureaucrats infringing on your freedom, and government deficits as far as the eye can see.

So when Tea Party Republicans, bankrolled by a handful of billionaires, began calling the Affordable Care Act a "wholesale takeover of American health care," many Americans were inclined to believe them. Health care is such a huge and complicated system, affecting us and our families so intimately, that our inherent distrust of government makes us instinctively wary. It's no accident we're still the only advanced nation not to have universal health care. FDR decided against adding it to his plan for Social Security because he didn't want to jeopardize the rest of the program; subsequent presidents never got close, at least until Obama.

The best argument for the Affordable Care Act is that our current health care system is so dysfunctional -- the most expensive in the world with the least healthy outcomes (highest infant mortality, shortest life spans, worst rates of chronic disease) of any advanced nation -- that we had no choice but to try to fix it. Even so, it's a typical American fix: We're still basing it on private health providers and private insurers. All government does is subsidize the poor, require insurers to take in people with pre-existing health problems, and pay for it by requiring everyone to be insured.

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And that's exactly what some Tea Partiers have began sounding like -- traitors to the system, radicals for whom the end they seek justifies whatever means they think necessary to achieve it. They began losing support even among Americans who had bought their view of the Affordable Care Act.

So they've had to back down, and soon, hopefully, we can move to the next stage -- negotiating over the size of government. That's should be stronger ground for the Tea Partiers. But the President, Democrats, and any moderate Republican who dares show his face can still gain ground by framing the question properly: The size of government is not the problem. It's who government is for. The best way to reduce future budget deficits is to ensure it's for all of us and not just a privileged few.

That means revenues should be raised from the wealthy, who have never been wealthier -- limiting their deductions and tax credits, closing loopholes like "carried interest," and taxing financial transactions. Spending should be cut by ending corporate welfare -- terminating tax subsidies to oil and gas, ballooning payments to agribusiness, sweetheart deals for military contractors, and the "too big to fail" subsidy for Wall Street's biggest banks. Future health-care costs should be contained by using the government's bargaining leverage over providers (through Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act) to force a shift from fee-for-service to payments-for-healthy-outcomes. And we should spend more on high-quality education and infrastructure for everyone.

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