Republican Death Panels

There will be a panel of experts who will decide who lives and dies! 

For those of you without the memory of a goldfish, the aforementioned phrasing should promptly bring us all back to the year 2009 when a stout, young President Barack Hussein Obama was engaged in a prolonged battle to bring about health insurance reform. Thanks to the late seating of Minnesota Senator Al Franken and the failing health of Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, President Obama had a mere 6 months of a Democratic House and a Democratic supermajority in the United States Senate. Laying his entire presidency on the line, President Obama worked tirelessly to promote his vision of health insurance reform to both the Democratic Party and the American people. Like any piece of transformative legislation, what would become the Affordable Care Act had to be watered down from its original version, with special consideration being given to turncoat Senator Joe Liebermann who flat-out refused to support a public option. On Christmas Eve of 2009, Speaker Nancy Pelosi allowed 35 vulnerable Democratic congresspeople to vote against the ACA and Senate Majority leader Harry Reid kept his entire caucus along with the independents together to earn 60 votes, the bare minimum needed for passage in the Senate. Without a single Republican vote, President Barack Obama was able to pass the most significant progressive legislation in a generation.

But the battle had just begun.

Because throughout the internal Democratic fight to pass the ACA was a lurking Republican war on the facts and truth of what the ACA was and what it aimed to do. Leading the fight was a still relevant Sarah Palin, who in August of 2009 decried that the ACA would establish "death panels" that would decide if someone like her child with Downs Syndrome would be allowed to live. There was no basis in this assertion, but that didn't stop GOP stalwarts like Chuck Grassley and Newt Gingrich from running with the allegation. Over the next 4 months, a key theme of legislative town halls would be concerned seniors asking about these alleged death panels. Despite the Obama Administration immediately denying the accusation and Barack Obama himself calling the charge a lie in a September joint-address to Congress, there would end up being roughly 30 percent of the population believing that the ACA had some sort of death panel written into it. Even after Palin's false death panel accusation would be named as Politifact's 2009 lie of the year, the term death panel would continue to linger in and around Republican circles for years to come.

Flash forward 11 years.

In 2020, the United States is facing the worst pandemic in a century and the first pandemic to be seen in real-time with a global audience. Those of us in the United States saw firsthand the emergence of COVID-19 from Wuhan, China in January, and the ways in which it began to spread, first by cruise ship and then through international airports into Australia, Europe, South America, and ultimately the United States. Despite having an imbedded CDC expert in Beijing and a 69-page pandemic response plan meticulously prepared by the Obama Administration, Donald J. Trump treated the virus like one of his ex-wives by ignoring it, refusing to admit it happened, downplaying its importance, and ultimately dealing with it only when there were no other options. Because of Trump's not wanting to insult his trading partner in Chinese President Xi and not wanting to hurt the economy in an election year, he wasted 2 months dillydallying around while case after case appeared on American soil.

Even with exploding cases, Donald Trump and his administration rather than acting in the public interest, tried to monetize the situation. Trump denied requests for critical PPE and ventilators for blue states while being overly generous to Republican Governors like Ron DeSantis in Florida. Despite documented cases of hospital workers being forced to wear trash bags as PPE, Trump continued to insist that any accusation that there was a shortage of PPE was "fake news." When it came time for Trump to work hand-in-hand with the nation's governors, rather than offer a sympathetic ear, he instead chose to insult blue state governors like Michigan's Gretchen Whitmer, he ordered Mike Pence to refuse to aid Washinton Governor Jay Inslee, and he engaged in an online Twitter spat with New York's Andrew Cuomo. Instead of relying on the federal stockpile of ventilators, states were forced to come up with new and creative ways around the inactive federal government with California inking its own deal with China for 150 million masks and Maryland purchasing and subsequently hiding 500,000 COVID-19 test kits to ensure that the federal government didn't hijack them. These states, and these governors were able to save lives in spite of rather than in coordination with the Trump Administration.

Yet, despite seeing a gradual decrease of COVID-19 cases in states like New York, Republican governors, like the president, chose to ignore science and put politics over people's lives. Specifically, we've seen a huge spike in the numbers from states with Republican governors like Arizona, Texas, and Florida. In Arizona, the spike is being attributed to the early ending of the stay-at-home order by Governor Doug Ducey. In Texas, Governor Greg Abbott reopened early and has now been forced to pause his reopening after having a single-day high of COVID-19 cases on Thursday. And in Florida, the state with the highest COVID-19 increase in the nation, Governor Ron DeSantis is insisting upon reopening his state as scheduled, despite the obvious health risk to his constituents.

Over the last 6 months, we've seen Republican governors and a Republican president make a series of decisions regarding a global pandemic. These decisions have ignored scientists and those who were versed in pandemic preparation. The initial wave of a deadly virus was ignored for economic and political reasons. Favorites have been played due to one's political affiliation. Citizens have been forced to suffer and have died because their governor happened to be of a different party than the president of the United States. Republican governors, fearful of having a prolonged quarantine that hurts their state economies and subsequent reelection chances, have opted to reopen their states too early, causing thousands of needless deaths. In summary, we've seen Republican leaders make critical decisions about who should live and die based on their own personal interests.

If that's not a death panel, I don't know what is.