Obamacare As Kludge

Paul Krugman discusses how Obamacare and Medicare got where they are with the "help" of the GOP and concludes:

...

No, the assault on Medicare is really about an ideology that is fundamentally hostile to the notion of the government helping people, and tries to make whatever help is given as limited and indirect as possible, restricting its scope and running it through private corporations. And this ideology, at a fundamental level — more fundamental, even, than vested interests — is why Obamacare ended up being a big kludge.

... For now, the priority is to get this kludge working, and once that’s done, America will become a better place.

In the longer run, however, we have to tackle that ideology. A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn’t have to be that way.

Your economic wellbeing,
GOP model

The GOP ideology Krugman refers to pitches the same shit Republicans have been pitching for decades. It's no more true now than it was in my childhood; it makes no more sense regarding Medicare and Obamacare now than it ever did about Republican plans (if one can dignify, e.g., Paul Ryan's fantasy with the word "plan") for the economy.

If the GOP withers and goes to ground, America may become healthy for the short time (IMHO) before global climate change hammers us for good and all. But if the GOP continues its minority rule by a relatively small group of crazies in one chamber of one branch of government, we aren't going to last even that long. People driven to the desperation of joblessness, homelessness and hunger aren't as particular about whether their approaches to redress are good for the whole society or not, and even Republicans, whatever they may actually believe, cannot live in the chaos that will inevitably ensue.