GOP fear-mongering on health care reform spins out of control

The fear-mongering and lies from the Republicans against the President’s heath care reform proposal are going full-tilt.

The Oakland County Republican Party and extremist rightwing chair David Law are sending out an email that makes the outrageously false claim that it will outlaw all private medical insurance and that the federal government take over healthcare in the U.S. To make sure you get it, the word outlaw is in all caps. Apparently, the GOP didn’t get the results of the last election where the American people said they wanted change, and that change included health care reform and access to health care for the more than 47 million Americans with no access to affordable health care.

The GOP claim is absolutely false, but that has not stopped the rightwing noise machine from pushing that false claim. The real truth is that if you like your health-care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health-care plan, period. The single payer option that I favor may make for profit health insurance providers irrelevant, but that is not in the proposal, unfortunately. What is being proposed is a public option that will increase competition, stop insurance companies from denying coverage for people with so-called existing conditions and lower heath care costs.

The lie is also being pushed that the government will get between the patient and the doctor. That is also false. But the fact is now the insurance provider is getting in between the doctor and the patient. Millions of people have had a situation where a doctor ordered a certain test or treatment, and the insurance company said no, they were not going to cover it. There is a good reason the health insurance provider lobby is spending $1.4 million a day to fight health care reform.

We simply cannot afford not to reform health care. Medical problems caused 62 percent of all personal bankruptcies filed in the U.S. in 2007, according to a study by Harvard researchers, said a story published in Business Week. And in a finding that surprised even the researchers, 78 percent of those filers had medical insurance at the start of their illness, including 60.3 percent who had private coverage.

The obstructionist Republicans have offered zero new or viable proposals to reform the high cost of heat care or a plan to cover the people who have no health care, but they are using the issue to try and take power back.

In fact, taking power back is their only concern in this fight. Screw the 47 million Americans with no access to health care, and that number is rising every day as people lose employer provided health care as they lose jobs or the company drops in order to compete globally with countries that provide universal health care.

Last week, Republican Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina gleefully fired up the troops with this line, "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him."

The focus of Republicans is to simply get Obama and snatch power back, not fixing a massive problem. It appears the strategy is to delay it as long as possible so it will lead to its death, and to use the old GOP standby strategy that if you tell a lie often enough people start to believe it.

When the President campaigned for change, he was correct, but it’s the same old stuff from Republicans.