Michael Steele's Factually Wrong Health Care Message

"260 million Americans currently have health insurance coverage, the great majority through private insurers, and polls consistently show that they are overwhelmingly pleased with their current coverage. ... The vast majority of Americans like their health care coverage. The vast majority of Americans like the quality of their health care. The vast majority of Americans don't want Uncle Sam to touch their health care."

RNC Chairman Michael Steele

Steele and other Republicans have been delivering the message that the American people are satisfied with the current state of health care. A New York Times/CBS poll shows 59 percent believe the government would do a better job with health care than the private insurance industry.
A Gallup poll shows 56 percent support of the America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009. The only reason for the slip in some poll numbers is the dishonest information from Republicans.

New York Times columnist David Brooks said the rich would by taxed by 52 percent to 57 percent.

They got a House bill out, they've got a Senate bill moving forward. They're scaring the dickens out of the moderates in their own party, let alone the Republicans. They're scaring the dickens out of them because the House bill calls for raising the top tax rate to 52 or in some cities 57 percent. That's higher than in France, Spain, Italy...

Nowhere in the House bill does it lay down such a health care tax. No one making under $350,000 will pay health care taxes. Here is a breakdown by income brackets.



Another Republican myth is that the House health care bill will add the the federal deficit. The Congressional Budget Office found the House bill would save the government money. Republicans want to kill health care for the same reasons as 1993. They are afraid public option health care will provide the Democratic Party the same political success as the New Deal.

Bill Kristol worked for the Project for the Republican Future in 1993. Kristol sent memos to Congressional Republicans urging them to kill Bill Clinton's attempt at Universal Health Care. The message was health care reform would be a political victory for Clinton.

"Health care will prove to be an enormously healthy project for Clinton... and for the Democratic Party." So predicts Stanley Greenberg, the president's strategist and pollster. If a Clinton health care plan succeeds without principled Republican opposition, Mr. Greenberg will be right. Because the initiative's inevitably destructive effect on American medical services will not be practically apparent for several years--no Carter-like gas lines, in other words--its passage in the short run will do nothing to hurt (and everything to help) Democratic electoral prospects in 1996. But the long-term political effects of a successful Clinton health care bill will be even worse--much worse. It will relegitimize middle-class dependence for "security" on government spending and regulation. It will revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests. And it will at the same time strike a punishing blow against Republican claims to defend the middle class by restraining government.

For Republicans this has nothing to do about policy. (I'm sure most Congressional Republicans don't care for the public option.) Republicans don't bring up the CBO report and have not offered a serious alternative to rising health care costs. Their fundamental objection to the public option is to provide the Democrats a defeat and an issue to use in the 2010 elections.