The One-Two Punch - Democratic Underground

Nikki Stone1

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Tue Mar-23-10 03:30 PM
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The One-Two Punch

Home with a bum knee, I made the mistake of turning on the radio. Clear Channel's KFI came blaring out, and the new host, a Canadian guy who just moved to LA, was talking about how amazed people were that there were mandates in the new health insurance law.

Mandates? You mean they didn't know?

The talk host went on to explain that the IRS would have to hire over 16,000 new employees to keep track of the insurance mandate, and bemoaned that the IRS would now have more intrusion into American lives.

Really? You didn't notice that the IRS was going to be in charge of this? (Yeah, that IRS, the one that had a plane crash into one of their buildings in Texas because they hounded a guy beyond endurance.)

Then the host talks about how alarmed his friends were that there was a fine for not buying insurance, that there could perhaps be imprisonment.

Uh, dude? Yeah, there was a big argument in the Senate over the fine. Where were you?

Then the host has the gall to say how he was the first person to bring up this issue of the mandates, the fines, the IRS--three days ago.

Three days ago?

The mandate has been in play since the beginning of this process. The mandate was sealed in the Senate bill and that was back in the fall. Three days ago? Where the hell have you been?

So how did talk radio, the alleged front line of attack against the health insurance bill, get it so wrong?

From the beginning, the health insurance bill has been marked by rhetoric, but by all the wrong rhetoric. The Democrats in Congress talked about the bill as if it were another social program, another Medicare, even though it was clear that there was little public option in the Congressional bill and none in the Senate bill. The GOP, on the other hand, talked about the bill as if it were the arrival of a Marxist state, complete with government controlled markets and Stalinesque purges for the right wing and their guns. The Democratic party faithful talked about "universal coverage" while the teapartiers drew Hitler mustaches on Obama posters. The funny thing is that both sides gave Americans the exact same impression: that the health insurance bill was a social/entitlement program like Medicare.

Remember when Senator Mary Landrieu stood up and told the Senate that people didn't really know what was in the health care bill? She was actually right about that, regardless of her reasons for making that statement. People didn't know what was in the bill, but they seem to be just finding out. Now people know that they face a fine and possible imprisonment if they don't buy a product from a private company. They are also beginning to learn that in order to enforce fines and imprisonment, the IRS now needs everyone's information on the status of their insurance policies, who provides them and what they provide for. This is why they need the extra 16,000 employees.

But whose fault is it that people didn't know what was in the bill?

Well, it's up to the media--mainstream and otherwise--to help people understand what the bill is. Those of us who read progressive blogs, like Firedoglake.com, were on top of all the information about the mandate. But people who relied on the mainstream media, and mainstream Democratic sites got the idea that the bill was a social program. And the rabid right wing media did no better, screaming about birth certificates and socialism.

Of course, since both sides were talking in quasi-socialist terms, the fact that the bill is a transfer of wealth from the middle and working classes to the wealthy got completely lost in the shuffle. The mandate creates that transfer of wealth.

Maybe that's why no one wanted to talk about the mandate.

Until now, like our LA talk show host with the Canadian accent.

But now it's too late. Some of the state lawsuits against this new law will bring up the mandate issue. It will be important to follow these arguments, because if the government can make me buy insurance on the private market, it can make me anything else. But these suits will fail to destroy this law. The American people have been sold down the river and they were misinformed by both "sides" of the debate. If more people knew the government was going to force them, under penalty of fine or imprisonment, to buy health insurance from the companies that were already screwing them over, there would have been less public support for this bill than there was. The only mandate they have control over now is the one at the ballot box.

And we all know how well that works.