Rooting for Failure
The brilliant question that should be asked of every Republican on every talk show: When did Republicans in Congress hold an oversight hearing on the leading cause of personal bankruptcy -- medical debt?
(Have Democrats held such a hearing?)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/29/opinion/egan-rooting-for-failure.html?_r=0
I just spent 15 minutes on my local health care exchange and realized that I could save a couple hundred dollars a month on my familys insurance. Of course, I live in Washington State, which has a very competitive market, a superbly functioning website and no Koch-brothers-sponsored saboteurs trying to discourage people from getting health care. California is just as good. Its enrolling more than 2,000 people a day. New York is humming as well. And Kentucky, its the gold standard now: More than 56,000 people have signed up for new health care coverage -- enough to fill a stadium in Louisville.
This is terrible news, and cannot be allowed to continue. If theres even a small chance that, say, half of the 50 million or so Americans currently without heath care might get the same thing that every other advanced country offers its citizens, that would be a disaster.
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Its hard to remember a time when a major political party and its media arm were so actively rooting for fellow Americans to lose. When the first attempt by the United States to launch a satellite into orbit, in 1957, ended in disaster, did Democrats start to cheer, and unify to stop a space program in its infancy? Or, when Medicare got off to a confusing start, did Republicans of the mid-1960s wrap their entire political future around a campaign to deny government-run health care to the elderly?
Of course not. But for the entirety of the Obama era, Republicans have consistently been cheerleaders for failure. They rooted for the economic recovery to sputter, for gas prices to spike, the job market to crater, the rescue of the American automobile industry to fall apart.