What it clarified, however, was less the cruelty of the Tea Party crowd than the absurdity of the health-care positions of all of the Republican candidates.
This article makes perfectly clear what I have been telling conservatives for years: we already have socialzed medicine, just the worst possible way to pay for it:
hospitals are required to treat the urgently ill without regard for their ability to pay, thanks to a bill signed by Ronald Reagan in 1986
So everyone gets medical care, once their condition becomes the most life-threatening - and expensive - it can be. In true Republican fashion, the problem of people dying in hospital waiting rooms was resolved by an unfunded mandate that hospitals provide care out of their own pocket; meanwhile, the cost of this care would not only be unpaid, but unacknowledged by Republicans who would continue to object to forcing people to spend money on other people.
The unfunded mandate forced on hospitals is effectively a poll tax; everyone winds up paying it at the same rate. This is the definition of a regressive tax, which is to say, a tax that hits poor people harder than rich people. Ever since Reagan, the only consistent platform in the Republican party has been, "Tax cuts for the rich."
And yet poor and middle class people keep voting for them. Truly, we get the government we deserve.
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