More GOP bluffing on health-care failure

By Alan Keyes

Many people who helped the GOP win nominal control of both houses of Congress and the presidency are unhappy with the results. At the moment, Congress's failure to implement its promise to reverse Obamacare's socialist government takeover of the U.S. health sector is the most obvious reason for this unhappiness. Though Obama's White House took the lead in formulating and fighting for the passage of Obamacare, some people who voted for Donald Trump are loath to think about the lack of organized leadership from the White House in the effort to undo it. Others blame the GOP leaders in Congress, who showed about as much competence and courageous vision in their efforts to reverse Obamacare as they did in their opposition to its passage.

It's telling that, in what should have been effective efforts to mobilize the strong opposition to Obamacare that helped fuel Donald Trump's victory in the last election, they were willing to settle for mere slogans ("repeal Obamacare" or "repeal and replace" Obamacare). This may be sufficient to mobilize negative feelings at election time, but when it comes to mobilizing public support for legislation, persuasion requires getting people to commit to a positive purpose, especially when replacing a policy initiative touted in terms of all the positive things it would do for people supposedly left without access to America's scientifically advanced health-care services.

Arguments that prove that Obamacare isn't working, isn't reaching, isn't delivering surely raise the anxiety quotient of people who thought they would be benefited by it. But the key is to turn their disappointment with bad results into renewed confidence that better results will be achieved by dismantling it. Many in the GOP's voter base are there because the party's longstanding emphasis on private-sector economic approaches resonates with their own thinking and aspirations. The socialist promotion of Obamacare relied on cultivating the largely false assumption that the private sector simply failed to assure adequate access to quality health care for too many of our people. The advocates of socialism in health care define the private sector as the problem, and government regulation and control as the solution.

The GOP voter base includes many people unconvinced by this propaganda. They have the right to expect that the party that touts its commitment to liberty and free enterprise would refute that propaganda with references to facts showing that the government's welfare and regulatory schemes have largely contributed to rising costs, while promoting unfunded demands for services that make expanding them financially threatening to health-care institutions. The GOP's constituency have the right to expect that the party that purports to respect the moral premises of liberty would also highlight the contradiction between promoting risky sexual behaviors as "rights," for example, and the logic of solvency for health insurance, where the bottom line depends on maintaining a ratio between sickness and health that benefits from responsibly self-disciplined behavior.

Encouraging people to make themselves sick and then taxing them to pay for the result isn't a recipe for providing better, more accessible health services. It's a recipe for abusing control of access to health services as a means of assuring political control over the people who need them. Socialism pretends to be all about what serves "the people." But it's really all about serving people up to be fodder for party machines, which allow would-be tyrants access to the powers of government by ostensibly democratic means. This aim of power is what the elitist faction leaders in both political parties have in common.

This is why even the most objectionable features of socialist schemes like Obamacare may trace their lineage to institutional sources identified with the party that supposedly rejects them. It's why the first major test of Obamacare's provisions came under the patronage of a GOP governor. It's why the pretended commitment to repeal Obamacare turned out to be political "sales puffery," evaporating once the votes were cast. The whole Obamacare debacle points to what I have argued again and again to be the reality of America's present political process: We don't have a two-party system. We have elections staged between two wings of the same elitist faction. Both see the electoral system strictly as a means to power and a useful façade that facilitates their abuse of power once it has been obtained.

Donald Trump's victory relied on a true grassroots desire to revolt against this twin-party sham. Yet the unified GOP control of the U.S. government that resulted from the last election has failed to deliver. Instead, results in both foreign and domestic policy seem consistent with the agendas that have, since the end of the Reagan era, characterized the elitist faction's intentions for both the Democratic and Republican parties. Those agendas are untrue to either party label. They lurch consistently toward liberty-usurping government power, implemented through expansive executive regulation and bureaucracy.

This reflects the oligarchic vision of an increasingly powerful few. What has become of the conviction of right and rights, by God endowed, that encouraged, and relied on, the self-discipline of liberty, which is freedom rightly used? Replaced by licentious delusions of unlimited freedom, the America dream of liberty appears to be fading into the age-old nightmare of Godless, outright tyranny of self-idolized human power.

Will the White House save America from this regressive fate? The true meaning of American liberty requires that it arise from within, with the revival of our good faith and reverence, as a people. But how will that happen, unless our hearts consent to be the temple of God, who made us – wherein we reverence the truth that only the offspring of His goodwill can be our salvation, whom He has already anointed, sacrificed, and yet restored to life to offer us the way?

© Alan Keyes