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 family's 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. It's enrolling more than 2,000 people a day. New York is humming as well. And Kentucky, it's 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 there's 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.
But not to worry. The failure movement is active and very well funded. You probably know about the creepy Uncle Sam character in ads financed by the Koch brothers. Sicko Sam is seen leering over a woman on her back in a hospital exam room, her legs in stirrups. This same guy is now showing up on college campuses, trying to get young people to opt out of health care. On some campuses, he plies students with free booze and pizza -- swee-eeet!
The Republican Party started a failure campaign earlier this year, but then the strategy got sidetracked in a coercive government shutdown that cost us all $24 billion or so. With the disastrous rollout of the federal exchange, Republicans now smell blood. A recent memo outlined a far-reaching, multilevel assault on the Affordable Care Act. Horror stories -- people losing their lousy health insurance -- will be highlighted, and computer snafus celebrated.
Ron Paul, the nuttier of the two political Pauls, recently suggested to a crowd in Virginia that "nullification" of the health care law might be the best way to kill it. I'm not sure what he meant by that, but it sounds illegal.
It's 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 entity 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.
I get it. This organized schadenfreude goes back to the dawn of Obama's presidency, when Rush Limbaugh, later joined by Senator Mitch McConnell, said their No. 1 goal was for the president to fail. A CNN poll in 2010 found 61 percent of Republicans hoping Obama would fail (versus only 27 percent among all Americans).
Wish granted, mission accomplished. Obama has failed -- that is, if you judge by his tanking poll numbers. But does this collapse in approval have to mean that the last best chance for expanding health care for millions of Americans must fail as well?
Does this mean we throw in the towel, and return to a status quo in which insurance companies routinely cancel policies, deny health care to people with pre-existing conditions and have their own death panel treatment for patients who reach a cap in medical benefits?
The Republican plan would do just that, because they have no plan but to crush the nation's fledgling experiment. Sometimes they bring up vouchers, or tort reform, or some combination of catchphrases. Here was Sarah Palin, who is to articulate reason what Mr. Magoo is to vision, on the Republican alternative, as she told Matt Lauer:
"The plan is to allow those things that have been proposed over many years to reform a health care system in America that certainly does need more help so that there's more competition, there's less tort-reform threat, there's less trajectory of the cost increases. And those plans have been proposed over and over. And what thwarts those plans? It's the far left."
Yes, it is a big and legitimate news story, for a presidency built on technical expertise, that the federal exchange is not working as promised. Ditto Obama's vow that people could keep their bottom-feeder health care policies.
But where were the news conferences, the Fox News alerts, the parading of people who couldn't get their lifesaving cancer treatments under the old system? Where was the media attention when thousands of people were routinely dumped once they got sick? When did Republicans in Congress hold an oversight hearing on the leading cause of personal bankruptcy -- medical debt?
All of that is what we had before. And all of that is what we will return to if some version of the Affordable Care Act is not made workable. Republicans have a decent chance, in next year's elections, of killing the dream of progressive presidents going back to Teddy Roosevelt. But they shouldn't count on it. What's going against them, or any party invested in failure, is that Americans are inherently optimistic. That alone may be enough to save Obamacare.
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