Heartless Bastards

The American Health Care Act, a truly awful piece of legislation by virtually any measure, passed in the House of Representatives yesterday. Following this “victory,” the House Republicans were bused over to the White House for – wait for it – a beer bash and victory celebration. Forget the fact that celebrating after a sure-to-be-rewritten bill has passed only the House is like declaring victory in an NBA playoff game when you hold a one-point lead at the end of the first quarter. What really gets to me is the naked, crass lack of empathy for the weakest members of our increasingly broken democracy: our sick, handicapped, and poor. Tack on the party’s pathological focus on rolling back all of our meager progress on women’s health issues, and we have a party in control of both houses of congress, not to mention the white house, careening down a very dark road, with the accelerator on the floor.

Unfortunately, the gear is reverse.

A week ago, getting this bill passed looked like an impossible task. It was too radical for the moderate Republicans and too moderate for the radical wing known as the House Freedom Caucus. The compromise bill was only successful after strong-arm lobbying of individual congressmen by Speaker Paul Ryan and Vice President Mike Pence, and two amendments, one to please the moderates and another to appease the radicals. It is the shockingly cynical MacArthur amendment that deserves the most scrutiny as well as the most scorn. It is essentially a loophole big enough to drive the buses that took these guys to the White House through. It is both deceptive and utterly cynical. It allows the individual states to opt out of many of the key guarantees of Obamacare like coverage of pre-existing conditions and lifetime caps on insurance payouts.

As a veteran of advanced bladder cancer, both the pre-existing conditions and lifetime caps changes have a very real chance of affecting me personally. But don’t weep for me; I’m an old man who has had a great life. Weep for the child who is born with a serious disease, a child who may never be able to have heath insurance in her entire life due to this calculatedly cruel bill. Take ten minutes and watch Jimmy Kimmel’s tearful monologue about the heart disease and surgery that his newborn son endured. He closes with the question: Whether you are a Democrat, a Republican, or something else, can we not all agree that we must not let our children die because we disagree on how health care should be provided? Personally, I think Jimmy gives the Republican party too much credit. They are not disagreeing on how health care should be provided so much as whether it should be, for certain citizens at least.

My biggest fear is that the purveyors of this Faustian bargain will not be taken to task for their inhumanity, and that our apathetic and disconnected electorate will simply not care enough to get off their collective asses and send these devils packing in 2018. I feel physically ill when I view the images of their callous and tone-deaf victory beer party. Our beloved leader talks of improved care and lower costs knowing full well that his words are blatant lies. I gag at the sight of rich old white men chuckling about their supposed win, and seeing Paul Ryan’s twisted leer of a knowing smile is to look into the face of evil itself.

I ask you, the citizen, the potential voter: Will you rise above your partisan politics and call this travesty of a health care plan what it is? Will you admit that most of our Republican congressmen care only about their own monetary gain and political power, and not a whit about what is right for you and our country? Will you tolerate living in an amoral society where we allow the neediest of our fellow citizens, many of them innocent children, to die? Because that is exactly what we are talking about here, the death of our weakest. Will you look at these men and call them what they are?

They are heartless bastards.

Portland, OR
May 5th, 2017