"If It's So Great, Why Don't You Do It?": One of the Stupidest Anti-Obamacare Arguments:
On Morning Starbucks with Joe Scarborough's Beady Eyes, Mika Brezinski's Sneer, and the Pickled Corpse of Mike Barnicle, Rep. Sean Duffy, Republican of Wisconsin, said the hosts should ask "liberal guests" on the show, "Why won’t you join Obamacare? If it’s good for Americans, why isn’t it good for you?”
This question and its variants has been a talking point for Republicans both before and during this crisis they brought on. Rand Paul, giving Ted Cruz a moment to shit his diaper in peace during the notafilibuster, asked the question of Barack Obama: "'Mr. President, are you willing to take Obamacare? If you don’t want it, why are we stuck with it?'"
It's the question at the core of the Vitter Amendment, named for the Senator who wishes he could shit his diaper on the floor of the Senate. It would make all members of Congress and their staffs find insurance on the Affordable Care Act exchanges and, just because if you're gonna be a prick, you may as well be a mega-prick, receive no subsidies from their employer (you know, the government) to help. Rep. Tim Huelskamp, Kansas GOP nut, on Al Sharpton's just terrible MSNBC "show," fluffing Vitter like a New Orleans prostitute, said that if it’s good enough for the rest of the country, "it should be good enough for the President of the United States" and other federal employees.
On and on this could go, with more and more members of Congress, with right-wing media, with knuckle-dragging bloggers all joining into a dissonant chorus of farts and vomit noises around a single line: "If it's so good/great, why isn't Congress/the President/Kathleen Sebelius/Mitch McConnell's shell shiner being forced onto it?"
Dear, sweet conservatives, especially those of you devoid of thought except for what Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity piss into your ears, listen closely. Here's the answer to your question: It's because the law is meant to cover people who don't have access to health insurance, you dumb fucks. It's meant to be something for people who have nothing, people who aren't poor enough for Medicaid or have preexisting conditions that prevent them from getting insurance. If it was meant for everyone, we would call it "single payer" or "universal health care" or "socialized medicine" or "that thing that works in every other fucking country but we're too deluded to enact here."
It's goddamned childish, like saying, "If you like Obamacare so much, why don't you marry it?" It's like saying that if public housing is so awesome, why doesn't everyone live in it? Would you support a bill to force members of Congress to live in Barry Farm?
You know who it wasn't meant for? People who already get health insurance through their jobs. That's a benefit, something that people get instead of higher pay. If you want to kick anyone off their health insurance and not provide subsidies, you better fucking pay 'em more with the money that's not being used to give 'em insurance, but that's not in the Vitter Amendment, is it?
Sure, sure, go ahead and cite the very few examples of companies who have been total assholes to their employees. But 96% of companies aren't affected by the Affordable Care Act (except in that it will lower health costs overall). And of the 4% that are affected, nearly 95% of them won't be bothered by it. But, no, really, go ahead and dig out your exceptions, like your invisible welfare queens and your phantom voter fraud cases.
Stop being such pussies and admit what's really going on here. The Vitter Amendment's purpose was to drive people away from government jobs. And, as so many have pointed out, there is a deep, deep fear in right-wingers that, once they have insurance and are getting regular health care, people will think that this program that's supposedly as bad as slavery times the Holocaust to the power of 9/11 isn't so bad and that the streetcorner screamers of the right are full of shit.
The battle is over, motherfuckers. Put down your weapons and return to your homes. Kiss your loved ones. And we can all warm ourselves by the fire made from the corpses of Republicans who threw themselves at the barricade only to get themselves impaled right through their cold, awful hearts.
