We all know about the Republican support for a health care system that gouges patients, fails to serve at-risk constituencies, and enriches heartless corporations (who in turn enrich the Republicans). We know about the right-wing’s indifference to families who are thrust into bankruptcy due to exorbitant medical bills. And we are all too aware of the Tea Party conservatives’ fixation on repealing the Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare), which they have voted on thirty-seven times in the House of Representatives knowing full well it would never advance to the senate.
There is no ambiguity in the fact that the GOP is determined to defend a broken system that favors the rich and abandons everyone else to a Randian law of the jungle that guarantees that people will die unnecessarily. And Fox News is a critical component in the anti-health propaganda fest designed to keep the American people ignorant and sick.
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In recent days Fox News has been escalating their disinformation campaign by attacking uncontroversial plans to give the American people information about their options under the new law and to educate them about the health insurance exchanges that will be launching next year. Fox has taken the side of the GOP anti-health zealots by criticizing routine efforts to provide the public with details about the program.
Reports that the Department of Health and Human Services is seeking to publicize the availability of insurance plans by advertising and otherwise partnering with sports leagues, libraries, and schools have been met with ludicrous objections from the right. They have characterized these efforts as communist-style indoctrination and tyrannical coercion, even though they are nothing more than free market publicity. Fox News anchor Bret Baier went so far as to call it “threatening.”
Bret Baier: Forget reading, writing and arithmetic, you are paying about a million dollars to train public school children in California how to promote President Obama’s health care reform law. […] Officials are promising – or threatening – strict enforcement of the grants with monthly, quarterly, and annual reports.
Holy crap! Now the feds want reports to ascertain whether federal grant money is being used effectively. What’s next, concentration camps?
Other plans being discussed include working with the NFL and the NBA to educate citizens about their options. This has been lambasted by right-wingers on Fox who seem to think that providing information to citizens about programs that they are entitled to use is the work of Satan. They call it propaganda, but it is no more propaganda than public service announcements about seat belts or the dangers of drug use.
The only propaganda here is that employed by Fox News who is trying desperately to misrepresent ObamaCare and the efforts to educate the public about it. Their arguments against publicity campaigns that work with sports leagues, schools, and libraries, consist mainly of phony attempts to turn it all into a political debate. However, ObamaCare is not a political debate – it is the law. And consequently, people are entitled to know what it is and how to use it. There is nothing partisan about that.
What Fox and the GOP are hoping to do is to sabotage the new health care law. They want it to fail (like everything else this administration tries to do) so that they can achieve their goal of repeal and restore the previous system that made them all rich, but that left millions of Americans without coverage. And the best way to produce failure is to make sure that the American people are kept ignorant of the program, which would keep enrollment down. So any effort by the government to let the people know what their options are must be shot down by any means necessary.
This campaign of deceit by Fox and their benefactors is meant only to harm citizens who may be interested in improving health care for themselves and their families. It is not an effort to persuade anyone of the political merits of the plan. It merely informs people of what is currently available. But the anti-health right prefers that the nation be kept as ignorant as possible. That’s something that is apparent to any objective person who watches Fox News. But in this case, the result is not merely being ill-informed, it can lead to serious repercussions for the medical well-being of innocent citizens who are more interested in the health of their families than the phony political controversies that Fox is trying to create.
Fox is embarking on a shameful exercise in greed over humanity. And even Fox viewers should be concerned that their network is working so hard to make sure they stay stupid.
