By Dave Lindorff
One thing you can say about Karl Rove: the guy pretty much telegraphs his intention to lie, distort and just make sh*t up in an ends-trump-means effort to win at all costs.
For keeping Republicans in the game even as their racist white, male, uber-Christian, know-nothing political base keeps shrinking, that is an essential tactic — one Rove perfected in the seemingly impossible task of making George W. Bush into a viable candidate for Texas governor and later president of the US.
Rove applied his dissembling skills in a Jan. 31 op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, a section of that Murdoch/News Corp.-owned rag noted for its fact-challenged political screeds.
“Medicare for All” will terrify voters,” Rove predicted, in a swipe at the first campaign outing of Democratic presidential candidate wannabe (and pretend progressive) Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) during which she enthusiastically endorsed progressive Democrats’ most winning issue — expanding Medicare to cover everyone. Harris “made her party’s left-wing base happy this week,” Rove wrote, “but in doing so, she might have made Democrats less attractive to general-election voters.”
Rove then proceeded to trot out one lie after another — from the thoroughly discredited “research study” of Koch-brothers-funded former Social Security public trustee Charles Blahous which claimed Medicare for All would cost $32.6 trillion over the next 10 years, to a poll by the private health insurer-linked Kaiser Family Foundation purporting to show that popular support for Medicare for all, while high now, would collapse “when people hear more about its possible effects.”
If what people hear is limited to Rove’s and the Republican party’s lies about Medicare for All, to Koch-funded “research” and to the tepid criticism the idea gets from centrist Democrats like Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), he would be right. And who knows? The way the corporate mass media have mis-covered “Medicare for All,” particularly when it’s being advocated by more progressive Democrats like Sen. Bernie Sanders or that favorite MSM “whipping girl” AOC, maybe Rove is right.
Rove’s biggest lie — one of omission primarily — is claiming that Medicare for All would cost over $3 trillion a year and massively increase taxes, without noting that at the same time, it would essentially eliminate private insurance premiums not just for employees, but for employers too, and that at the same time, it would also eliminate or replace programs like Medicaid, veterans care and hospital “charity” care (the latter which results in higher charges to insured patients and thus shows up as higher insurance premiums), since Medicare would be paying for everyone’s care.
Another lie of omission: Rover failed to note that even Blahous had to admit in his own study that even the Blahous study had to admit that in addition to covering the health of 30 million people currently without access to health care, Medicare for All would actually save $2 trillion over the current system during that same 10 years.
For the rest of this article by DAVE LINDORFF in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online alternative news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/the-right-wing-attack-on-medicare-for-all/