Arbeit Macht Frei, Save American Workers Act of 2014-- GOP And Blue Dogs Go For 52nd Vote To Kill The Affordable Care Act

Ever hear the German phrase Arbeit macht frei? The literal translation is fairly neutral: "work makes you free." But the reason the phrase resonates for people around the world is because when Jews, gypsies, union leaders, gays and other victims of the right-wing apocalypse of the 1940s arrived at the Auschwitz, Theresienstadt and Dachau death camps this phrase, in metal letters, was the first thing they saw above the gates. Work did not make them free. Today far right Indiana Congressman Todd Young had bis bill, H.R. 2575, the Save American Workers Act of 2014, voted on. I'm not categorically stating that Young is a modern day Nazi-- his work speaks for itself-- but I am saying that the purpose of his bill was to save the American work and much as his right wing political progenitors' metal letters were going to set the victims of Nazi oppression frei. Every single Republican voted for it-- as did 18 of the most right-wing Democrats. It passed 248-179. The right-wing Democrats who crossed the aisle to help the Republicans betray American workers today were:

• Ron Barber (Blue Dog-AZ)
• John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA)
• Ami Bera (New Dem-CA)
• Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)
• Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
• Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
• John Delaney (New Dem-MD)
• Pete Gallego (Blue Dog-TX)
• Dan Lipinski (Blue Dog-IL)
• Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)
• Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC)
• Patrick Murphy (New Dem-FL)
• Scott Peters (New Dem-CA)
• Collin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
• Nick Rahall (Blue Dog-WV)
• Brad Schneider (New Dem-IL)
• Kurt Schrader (Blue Dog-OR)
• Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)

What these 18 Democrats voted for-- at the urging of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and along with their GOP brethren-- was another scheme to kill the Affordable Care Act and deny health insurance to a least a million American workers. The bill changes the definition of a full-time employee from someone who works 30 hours a week to someone who works 40 hours a week. The aim is to allow companies with 50 or more employees to deny health insurance participation to anyone who works 39 hours/week or less. The CBO estimates that the new bill-- should it ever become law-- would kick at least a million people off their health insurance coverage. It was the House's 52 cynical vote to kill or maim ObamaCare. This is what you expect from Republicans. But you probably don't expect it from these 18 Democrats. You should. They're just as bad as Republicans-- every one of them.

7.1 million Americans have already signed up for health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Ryan's latest Austerity budget, released on April Fool's Day, seeks very deep cuts to Medicare that will prevent millions of Americans from getting health care. Dick Durbin said he saw Ryan's budget as a wake-up call for Americans-- a warning about what the GOP would do if they could ever get control of both houses of Congress. "You’re not going to turn away seven or 10 million people from insurance coverage-- doesn’t work anymore. And then comes Ryan. Thank you, thank you Congressman Paul Ryan, for reminding us what Republicans would do if they had control."

[T]he Ryan budget, which was approved by the House Budget Committee on Wednesday night along party lines, will present the Democrats a chance to expand the political conversation beyond health care, to more Democrat-friendly subjects like Medicare, Social Security, education funding and health research. The tax-and-spending plan once again proposes to convert Medicare into a “premium support” system in which older people would be given subsidies to purchase private insurance-- a proposal that Democrats ran on successfully in 2012.

It cuts Medicaid by $1.5 trillion over 10 years, food stamps by $125 billion, education programs by $145 billion-- including Pell grants-- and makes university students begin paying interest on student loans while still in college. Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, forecast that 57 percent of the people who vote will be over 50 this November, compared with 43 percent in 2012.

“The ability to drive our advantage on Medicare will be invaluable,” she said.

Wednesday E.J. Dionne opined in the Washington Post that the Republicans need to be held accountable for their willful sabotage of attempts to help ordinary Americans get medical care.

The ACA is doing exactly what its supporters said it would do. It is getting health insurance to millions who didn’t have it before. (The Los Angeles Times pegged the number at 9.5 million at the beginning of the week.) And it’s working especially well in places such as Kentucky, where state officials threw themselves fully and competently behind the cause of signing up the uninsured. Those who want to repeal the law will have to admit that they are willing to deprive these people, or some large percentage of them, of insurance.

Too many conservatives would prefer not to say upfront what they really believe: They don’t want the federal government to spend the significant sums of money needed to get everyone covered. Admitting this can sound cruel, so they insist that their objections are to the ACA’s alleged unworkability, or to “a Washington takeover of the health system” (which makes you wonder what they think of Medicare, a far more centralized program). Or they peddle isolated horror stories that the fact-checkers usually discover are untrue or misleading.

Thus the moment of truth, about the facts and about our purposes.

From now on, will there be more healthy skepticism about conservative claims against the ACA? Given how many times the law’s enemies have said the sky was falling when it wasn’t, will there be tougher interrogation of their next round of apocalyptic predictions? Will their so-called alternatives be analyzed closely to see how many now-insured people would actually lose coverage under the “replacement” plans?

Perhaps more importantly, will we finally be honest about the real argument here: Do we or do we not want to put in the effort and money it takes to guarantee all Americans health insurance? If we do-- and we should-- let’s get on with doing it the best way we can.