Calling ObamaCare “socialized medicine” truly lowers the standards on what could be considered socialized medicine. It’s like calling paved roads “government overreach”; a stop light a “government takeover of your commute”; or a neighborhood with speed bumps “a road to communism.” The law is really some regulations to help consumers buy private insurance coupled with a small fee if consumers decide not to buy said insurance.

Is it perfect? No. Could it be improved? Absolutely. However, ObamaCare is the opposite of socialism, it’s a market solution.

The right-wing got a “free” market solution to health care. That was their cause – personal responsibility their mantra – now it’s law. They got an entire reform bill incentivising citizens to buy into private for-profit insurance plans. This is the Republican vision for America: Less government more profits for giant corporations. This core of the Affordable Care Act was an idea floated by President Nixon in 1974, touted by the Heritage Foundation in 1989, introduced by Newt Gingrich in 1993 and implemented by Mitt Romney in 2005. And now? Now it’s a big festering albatross around Obama’s neck.

As former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said in front of the Supreme Court last week, "We have not waved the white flag of surrender on socialized medicine!”

So the decades-old Republican big idea finally gets Democratic presidential ink and now, if you ask a Republican, it’s an unconstitutional government takeover of health care Stalin would have loved. Mitt Romney wants to repeal ObamaCare and replace it with RomneyCare. Essentially repealing the Affordable Care Act with the Affordable Care Act. Leave it to a Republican frontrunner to vow their first act as president will be to waste time with redundancies while lamenting how ineffective government can be.

Now health care reform has reached the Supreme Court, we will have a ruling on the law in late June. Will it be overturned fully or partially or upheld? It’s anyone’s guess.

Regardless of the outcome, personal responsibility in health care is a Republican pet idea they’ve strapped to the roof of the car.

It makes the case that their ideas should never be law because if partisanship beckons, they’ll rally against them and call any Democrats who signed the bill, Hitler.

Imagine if Obama signed the most recent Paul Ryan Budget plan – a blueprint to cut taxes further for the wealthy and further increase the debt by not taking in enough revenues. If Obama embraced it, Republicans would storm the Capitol calling it a tax hike and a Maoist plot with Wall Street. People in tri-corner hats with signs reading, “Don’t raise my taxes!” and “Stop government takeover of business!” would swarm The Mall. The erosion of Medicare would make Republicans faint on the House floor. “It’s a tenet of Marxism to kill grandma!” They’d gasp.

Just remember, when George W. Bush took office the budget was set to be balanced in a few short years. Social security was actually its namesake – secure. And then he went uber-GOP-with-a-mandate – didn’t pay for any of the wars he started – just showered seniors with unpaid-for Medicare Part D and sent everyone in the country a rebate check. And when this “free market capitalism” failed? He bailed out the banks and the auto industry with taxpayer money, famously saying he “abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.”

Now? Now the Republicans blame the deficit, the debt, the recession, the bailouts and (wait for it) the wars on the Democrat in the Oval Office.

It’s a take on the Pottery Barn rule, “You break it, you buy it.” The Republican version: “We break it, we blame you … and call you a Nazi.”

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Ron Paul does a great job in these debates painting himself as the kindly old country doctor who remembers better times, when health care was available to all and didn't cost very much. Maybe costs were less because leeches were cheaper back then.

This particular spin suggests that Medicare and Medicaid were somehow birthed out of an idea and nothing more, that there was no reality at the time where people died, or couldn't get treated, where the elderly were always cared for in their old age and never had to rely on their family, or even bankrupt them, or where people simply died because there was no doctor to care for them or treat them.

It's an image that might be painted through the artists' eye, but it isn't realistic or reflective of what people endured. Neither is his answer to this woman's question, which is simple enough:

QUESTION: My name is Lynn Frazier and I live here in Jacksonville. And for the Republican presidential candidates, my question is, I'm currently unemployed and I found myself unemployed for the first time in 10 years and unable to afford health care benefits.

What type of hope can you promise me and others in my position?

(APPLAUSE)

BLITZER: Let's ask Congressman Paul.

Yes, let's ask Congressman Paul to give this woman a very real answer to a very real problem happening today, in this time, in this place. Look at what he says:

Continue reading »

There's always a nugget or two in these Wikileaks cables. Nothing earthshaking, but a window into how things work. If you thought the health care debate was something conjured up after Obama's election, think again. From a June, 2006 cable about Cuba:

NEWS: USINT is always looking for human interest stories and other news that shatters the myth of Cuban medical prowess, which has become a key feature of the regime’s foreign policy and its self-congratulatory propaganda.

I might also add that Cuba's medical system is precisely what conservatives fear most: a system which meets the needs of the people through a government-run health care plan.

Here are their "myth shatterers", filed under the subheader "Medical Malpractice::

31 May: Jamaican Dr. Albert Lue has publicly denounced Cuban medical incompetency in handling Jamaican patients who traveled to Cuba for eye surgery. Of 60 such patients he surveyed, 3 were left permanently blind and another 14 returned to Jamaica with permanent cornea damage.

--Dateline 1 June: 14,000 Bolivian doctors are on strike to protest the 600 Cuban doctors who have been shipped into the country, with no concern as to displacement or unemployment among the Bolivian doctors, or qualifications of the Cubans.

Wow. 600 Cuban doctors frighten 14,000 Bolivian doctors. What babies. Assuming this cable is correct, which I doubt, to me it highlights the resolute determination of the right to deny a significant number of Americans health care. The fact that they look for Cuban stories to use as a way to debunk the Cuban system tells me there's real fear of what might happen if everyone in this country actually had real access to health care.

File this under the header "things you knew but couldn't prove." Now you can.

Here's a chaser:

In a recent appearance on Miami Cable TV station 41’s “A Mano Limpia” interview show, Cuban doctor and former Director of Family Medicine in the Ministry of Health, Alcides Lorenzo, slammed the Cuban medical system for being overly politicized. Lorenzo had just defected to the USA via Mexico, where he missed his connecting flight from Cancun to Havana, on the way back from an international conference in Peru. According to Lorenzo, Cuban doctors spend two-thirds of their time going to political meetings, as opposed to treating patients. Lorenzo also said that Cuban medical care was grossly understaffed and underfunded at home as a result of the “medical missions” overseas, particularly to Venezuela. Unfortunately for Lorenzo, or any other Cuban doctor who considers defecting from a “mission” overseas, his family is held hostage in Cuba and will not be permitted to leave the island.

I was able to find confirmation of his defection via a simple Google search. I was also able to find this statement from 2006 from CubaSource.org. I don't know whether they are objective, reliable or otherwise trustworthy, though I found the narrative in this PDF document to be pretty straightforward and opinion-free:

January 5: Sixty percent of primary care doctors in Cuba have been sent to Venezuela and other international missions, triggering a crisis across the public health programs of the island, said a high-ranking Cuban health care official who defected in Mexico. "The Cuban health care system has remained subordinated to the relation with Venezuela." According to Dr. Alcides Lorenzo Rodríguez, ex-chief of the national family medicine group of Cuba, out of 31,000 doctors working at offices of the so-called family doctor program in 2003, the majority have been enlisted as part of a 26,000-strong contingent of Cuban health care professionals currently deployed in Venezuela. (El Nuevo Herald, 6/1/06)

Whatever you may think of Cuba and the decision to ship a lot of their primary care doctors to Venezuela, the fact remains that they have a health care program that has a long history of delivering for the people of Cuba and is entirely government-sponsored. This seems to strike fear into the hearts of the American right-wing in an entirely irrational way to the point where they've actually instructed intelligence sources to dig up any dirt on the system they can. It's remarkable to me that these three nuggets were all they could find in a country of millions.