GOP Attitude Toward Health Care Is Remarkably Callous

The Republican party has an horrific and, I would think, pretty unique view when it comes to providing health care to our citizens. The attitude exists across the entire range of the party, from the right-wing fringes to what is called a “moderate” Republican these days. And that attitude is that somehow people who do not have or cannot afford health care either do not want it or don’t do enough to deserve to get it.

The extreme view comes from GOP Representative Roger Marshall from the no longer great state of Kansas, (thanks Sam Brownback and Arthur Laugher, I mean, Laffer). In a recent interview Marshall laid out his interesting views on health care. “Just like Jesus said, ‘The poor will always be with us’. There is a group of people that just don’t want health care and aren’t going to take care of themselves. The Medicaid population, which is [on] a free credit card, as a group, do probably the least preventive medicine and taking care of themselves and eating healthy and exercising. And I’m not judging, I’m just saying socially that’s where they are. So there’s a group of people that even with unlimited access to health care are only going to use the emergency room when their arm is chopped off or when their pneumonia is so bad they get brought [into] the ER.” Of course, the facts show that Obamacare has produced more preventive care and better outcomes for the recipients in those states that expanded Medicaid than those that didn’t. And I’m pretty sure that Marshall isn’t quite getting Jesus’ larger point when he says the poor will always be with us. That was not meant to imply that we should just ignore them, as apparently Marshall thinks we should. But it certainly provides a nice rationale for the GOP health plan that will only offer the poor the emergency room as their only medical option.

Susan Collins is one of the supposed GOP “moderates” in the Senate and she has been getting some love from Democrats these days for some unknown reason. If you look at her history, she only casts a dissenting vote against any egregious GOP policy when she know her vote won’t matter and the GOP will prevail. When the GOP needs her vote, she is always right there in line. In any case, here she is today, quoted by the NY Times. “Once low-income people are receiving good health care for the first time, it becomes very difficult for a member of Congress to take that assistance away from them. To deprive them of that health care is something that now makes a lot of people in my party uncomfortable.”

For Collins, it is not that providing low-income people with health care will make them healthier and save lives. It is not that you might consider providing quality health care for your citizens something you would want to do as a compassionate society. No, for her it is a problem because once they have it, it makes it harder to take it away.

And these people probably call themselves Christians.