Voters Must Catch On to Republicans’ Con on Health Care

Voters Must Catch On to Republicans’ Con on Health Care

Voters Must Catch On to Republicans’ Con on Health Care

The GOP’s duck-and-cover effort impedes a debate we need to have on providing universal coverage and increasing Social Security.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

A majority of working Americans have zero retirement savings. The three richest Americans hold more wealth than the bottom 50 percent of the country—some 160 million Americans. So Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), having pushed through a trillion-dollar tax cut that lards its benefits on the richest Americans, announces he wants to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and make another run at repealing the Affordable Care Act.

He said this not in English, of course, but in politicalese. He noted that the rising budget deficit is “disturbing” and that “entitlement programs” were “the real drivers of the debt” and must be adjusted “to the demographics of the future.” That is Beltway code for cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He also promised to try again to repeal the ACA, calling the failure to achieve that “the one disappointment of this Congress.” Cuts in “entitlements,” he suggested, must be done in a bipartisan fashion, while ACA repeal is a partisan Republican fixation. If Democrats take the House, he will push for cuts in Social Security. If Republicans retain control, they will try to repeal Obamacare again.

Under President Trump and the Republican-led Congress, the deficit has exploded. The Congressional Budget Office projects it at $793 billion for the fiscal year that just ended (and headed to surpass $1 trillion), noting its rise was due to “recently enacted legislative changes.” especially the 2017 tax cuts.

Read the full text of Katrina’s column here .

We cannot back down

We now confront a second Trump presidency.

There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.

Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.

Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

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Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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