It’s really hard to find a more hypocritical position that the National Right to Life Committee on health care. Peruse their website for a few minutes. The only mention of the recent budget debate is the proposed defunding of Planned Parenthood. Nothing on plans to privatize Medicare by forcing people to pay far more for their coverage (in fact, costs would increase overall, even as the publicly-funded part shrinks). Nothing on the plan to cut a trillion dollars from Medicaid, the basic health safety net for the poor. Nothing.
You might think that they focus only on abortion, and don’t pay much attention to health care. You would be wrong. One of their two major “action alerts” relates to the repeal of the Affordable Care Act (the other is Planned Parenthood). Their website has a lot to say about health care in general, and Medicare in particular. Without really providing any evidence, they asset that the Affordable Care Act is full of rationing. They defend the American health care system. Much of it is laughably out of date, including a criticism of the Clinton administration’s position on cost control in the 1990s.
It’s interesting that they go back to the 1990s, because he’s what you won’t find – any mention of the GOP’s attempts to cut Medicare by 14 percent in 1995 and 13 percent in 1997, or almost 60 votes taken by that party against protecting or strengthening Medicare over the past decade. You will find nothing about the recent proposals that would pretty much end Medicare as we know it.
All they really care about is the ability of people to purchase their own health care coverage. It’s that simple and that selfish. The poor and the uninsured be damned. They don’t care about pervasive rationing in the current system, with over 50 million uninsured and further 25 million underinsured. They don’t care about health costs being the leading cost of bankruptcy. They don’t care that rationing is far worse in the United States than in comparator countries, with 54 percent of people facing cost barriers to treatment. They don’t care that lack of insurance leads to 44,000 deaths a year. They don’t care about maternity costs not being covered. They don’t care about draconian budget cuts on the backs of the poor, which are closer to real-life death panels that anything they have conjured up from the Affordable Care Act. They just don’t care.
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