Jack & Jill Politics

Hat tip: MyDD.com

From OpenLeft:

If Private Health Insurance Is So Awesome, Why Would It Lose a Competition With Gov’t Health Care? (+)
by: David Sirota
Thu Mar 05, 2009 at 10:54

If government is so awful, so inefficient and so supposedly hated by the country as Republicans so often insist, how are those same Republicans insisting that Americans would overwhelmingly opt to be covered by a government-run health care program, if given the choice?

McConnell suggested there were areas in which Republicans won’t compromise, particularly the creation of a new public insurance program to compete with private insurers.
“Forcing free market plans to compete with these government-run programs would create an unlevel playing field and inevitably doom true competition,” the letter stated.

If the “free market” is as marvelously awesome as the GOP says, shouldn’t it have absolutely no problem winning a health-care competition with “government-run programs?” Or does this little-talked-about hypocrisy in the Republicans’ argument expose a brazen corruption? Does it show that the GOP is totally bought off by the private health insurance industry that Americans despise?

I’d say the latter. The GOP sees polls showing the public supports the concept of government-sponsored health care (and loves government programs like Medicare) – that is, the party knows that if given the choice, many Americans would choose a government-run program over private health insurance. But because the party is so owned and operated by the private health insurance industry, it is willing to effectively undermine its entire macro-argument about the supremacy of the free market so as to shill for its moneyed benefactors.

Here is a video from Think Progress. Listen to what the GOPer says about healthcare being a PRIVILEGE.

The fight is NOW. It is upon us. Tired of the GOP trying scare folks with ‘socialized medicine’. Over 40 million of my fellow Americans have no health insurance, and it’s time to end that – NOW.