That last post (about what to call the government-created health care fiasco) made me realize the genuinely difficult nature of the rhetorical problem the left faces right now. The country is stuck with a hugely unpopular program, and naturally, the left would like to deny or minimize it, and their natural response would be to come up with the right label, preferably a slick, reassuring euphemism. Unfortunately for them, they are stuck with two less than perfect choices — “Obamacare,” or the crassly Orwellian “Affordable Care Act.” (Granted, “Affordable Care Act” may have been intended as a euphemism, but it fails big time because rather than reassure, it insults the intelligence of a growing number of American voters.)
With good reason, Obama’s defenders don’t want his name tarnished by being chained to an unpopular program, yet the alternative — demanding that it be called the Affordable Care Act — is worse, because under the current circumstances that word — AFFORDABLE — is a cruel joke and a rhetorical disaster. As more and more people are discovering, health insurance has been rendered anything but affordable, so using that word has a much greater sting with voters than does Obamacare. They can’t change the name of the program, because it is the title of the law. Maybe they should have thought of a better name, but it’s too late now.
If they have any sense (and there’s no guarantee of that), they’ll stick with Obamacare.
Frankly, I hope they insist on calling it “affordable” and demand that everyone else do the same.
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One response to “Your health care is now affordable! (Yeah, and shit smells good, too!)”
The proper name is, of course, the Affordable Care Prevention Act, and the true purpose was, all along, to circumvent the sort of reform that should be emerging spontaneously in a recession.
But the lapdog corporatist press, with its population of “opinion leaders” who buy into the “there can be no good except through the federal government” mindset, happily spread the fiction that it was about reform… and, later, graduated to the bizarre claim that there was no health care in the U.S., and that by enacting this new law we would at last have health care.
The actual implementation is a grotesque tax-farming scheme, only with the risk of shortfalls falling on the State rather than on the tax-farmers. And yet, somehow, I haven’t heard anyone on the Left call it that.