One of the more outrageous accusations that the opponents of repeal and replace Obamacare being made by the left and its rabid horde of tweeters is that the American Health Care Act just passed by the House makes rape a Preexisting Condition and allows insurance companies to deny coverage to women who have been raped and abused. As a recent article in Reason points out, this is a lie on two levels.
First, the AHCA does not address rape or domestic abuse at all. Second, while the bill allows states to allow people with preexisting conditions to be charged higher premiums it also mandates that they be grouped together in high-risk pools and have their health care subsidized. There is nothing about denying anyone coverage.
So, if the notion the recently passed bill allows rape and domestic abuse victims to be denied coverage is so demonstrably false, why make the claim. The answer is that the opponents of doing away with Obamacare are employing a technique first developed by Adolf Hitler and later refined by Josef Goebbels called “the Big Lie.”
The technique is to make an assertion so bold and so outrageous that it will tend to be believed.
Under Nazism one of the big lies was that the Jews were responsible for Germany’s defeat in World War I. The modern times, the big lie is that Republicans want to kill old people, starve children, and oppress women. That the technique is being employed by a group that does not, by and large, favor world wars or genocide does not make it less contemptible. The problem is that the Democrats have the Internet and social media at their disposal, a technology that Nazi propagandists could not have imagined.
On the other hand, the left may well be overplaying its hand in its desire to be hysterical about attempts to reform health care reform. They cannot escape the indisputable fact that the Obamacare system is collapsing of its own weight, with insurance companies leaving the exchanges and premiums and deductibles skyrocketing.
Democrats are reduced to telling another big lie that Obamacare is folding like a cheap suit because Republicans are sabotaging it, sort of like the Jews “stabbing Germany in the back” at the end of World War I.
Repeal and replacing Obamacare is a work in progress and the Senate will shortly have its say in how it is done. Democrats could have some input into how that process is going to take place if they choose to. But the death of the current, misbegotten health care system is inevitable. It will either happen smoothly, if legislation is passed making it so, or it will happen ugly. The left should not escape blame if the latter is the case.