As an atheist, I can be a bit prickly on the issue of religion. That’s not terribly uncommon; most atheists I know have a bit of a short fuse on the subject.

One distinct advantage of being without religion, however, is that it makes it very easy to see a new one coming; we’re the canaries in the coal mine for irrational belief systems. So as the health care debate began to change from an argument on merits to an argument from faith, I got nervous.

The signs are everywhere.

Supporters of the bill fervently believe that the “Cadillac” Excise tax will ‘bend the cost curve’ without making existing insurance worse.

That is obviously false. Yet still, they believe.

Other true believers feel that, even if it does make your insurance worse, your employer will give you all the money they save on your premiums. Somehow, even though that money is taxed (and your benefits today aren’t), you will be better off, after healthcare dollars are turned into wages.

Only they won’t be.

So to review:
30% in the Towers-Perrin survey said if health reform increases employer costs, they would reduce employment
86% in the Towers-Perrin survey said if health reform increases employee costs for health care, they would pass those costs on to employees
9% in the Towers-Perrin survey and 16% in the Mercer survey say they would pass on any savings to employees in the form of wage increases

So employers are saying that the fundamental assumption that went into CBO’s and JCT’s calculations on the Cadillac tax are wrong. If the employers are right, it means that employees will get crappier health care–with more out of pocket expenses–but for the most part get no corresponding raise to help pay for those costs. Worse still, this means the revenue calculations will be wrong, because, while the government should be able to tax employers more (if the employers don’t find some other tax loophole), they won’t get any more taxes out of the workers.

Even the chief prophet of the Excise Tax himself, the very well-compensated defender of the faith Jonathon Gruber, admitted that his belief in the Holy Plan was based on the same quality empirical research you used to find in the Weekly World News:

Earlier in the day, I’d been talking to MIT economist Jon Gruber about this issue. “There are a few things economists believe in our souls so strongly that we have a hard time actually explaining them,” he said. “One is that free trade is good and another is that health-care costs come out of wages.”

Yes, it’s true because one man believes it. Also now determined to be true? The Loch Ness Monster, leprechauns, and Iraqi WMD.

Not to worry though; Jonathon Chait still has his ‘ardent’ faith in the excise tax… the fact that it conflicts with the real world doesn’t matter; with faith, the facts never do.

I guess if employers fail to turn the health care benefits they slash into wages, they’ll be transubstantiated into cold hard cash.

Yet other kool-aid guzzlers believe that the divine magic of the free market will bring down costs in a wholly private system. Yea, verily, the Exchange will deliver us from wandering in the health care desert lo these forty long years? Can I get an amen?

‘Amen!’ say the true believers. ‘Amen!’ says Ezra Klein.

Even as the data proving that the Exchange won’t help stares him right in the face.

For people, like, well, me, who think that the health insurance exchanges have a real shot at lowering health-care costs throughout the system, the graph above is difficult. For conservatives who believe that the key to constraining health-care costs is to encourage competition between insurers and give individuals the opportunity to choose, the graph above is difficult. Because what the graph above shows is that neither of those strategies has worked terribly well, at least as of yet.

Oh Most Benevolent and Powerful God of the Exchange, please, please forgive your humble servant for believing the data he can see with his own eyes, and not Your Wisdom, as revealed in the books of AHIP!

Finally, there are the saddest and most pathetic wretches of all, those who believe that if they pass this awful bill, then President Obama will come down from the mountain with his tablets of the Public Option, which he always supported anyway (except when it mattered).

Proven liar Lynn Woolsey (who really ought to practice a new signature, now that her original is worthless) swears to introduce a public option as soon as she votes for a bill without one.

Piecemeal tweaking of the health insurance system will not address this growing problem. We need to reform our health care system, and the public option must be included.

I will fight to include the public option in the final version of the health care reform legislation.

If it is not included, however, it will rise from the dead once again.

The day after the health care legislation is passed, I will introduce a bill calling for the public option.

Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-Calif.) is co-chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Her original promise can be redeemed for less than a grocery store coupon. But not to worry; the public option, like any good mythic figure, will rise from the dead. In fact, thanks to Woolsey, we won’t even have to wait three days for it to shamble out of the tomb she’s digging.

How generous.

This morning, Nancy Pelosi, sounding like a true cult acolyte with stars in her eyes, stated that the bill is the most important thing anyone in Congress will do ‘in their legislative lifetimes’. She knows it will pass, not because of the vicious, slimy White House whip campaign, but because she has, you guessed it, faith:

I have no intention of not passing this bill. I have faith in my members that we’ll be passing this.

Hallelujah! Now let’s pass out the snakes!

Brother.

So here we are. The House of Representatives has been traded to the Senate for a pack of cigarettes, and our mighty so-called Progressive Caucus (excepting Kucinich of course) has been reduced to a worthless pack of gibbering fanatics, scourging themselves until the elections in the fall. If only they have faith. If only WE have faith.

Faith in the Senate, which has done so much to earn our trust.

Faith in the health care bill, which as I’ve shown is a pile of myths and lies.

Faith in President Obama, who will go right back to believing in the Public Option, as soon as he signs a bill that turns Americans into the chattel of the Insurance Lobby.

I don’t know whether to laugh, cry, or vomit.

Imagine, if you will, a government that faces an urgent public need. This government decides, after an appropriate amount of pressure, to enact a law, a series of programs, to meet that need. The government has two options: enact the programs directly, in a very efficient manner with minimal overhead, helping the maximum number of people. Alternately, the government can please the free market fundamentalists (and large campaign donors) who pay off many of its representatives, and pay a private company, or cartel of companies, to provide the exact same service, at far higher price.

Only, of course, it’s not the exact same service. Inevitably, the private contractors will gouge, cut corners, and harass their other clients, the citizens. C’est la vie. A profit must be made.

Now imagine that after years of this arrangement, the government is in a desperate crunch for cash, and wants to cut the gravy train to help enact another major program. They decide that, gee, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to bribe a private company to treat its citizens like garbage, providing the exact same service (on paper) that the government could have provided, only at far higher cost. Wouldn’t it make sense, the representatives of that government argue, to do it ourselves?

All well and good, right. Only what’s the new program? Why, it’s to address an urgent public need… by paying a cartel of private companies… to provide a service that (in the rest of the developed world) is normally done by government… only they want to be paid a premium to do it, of course… and they need their profits guaranteed, of course…

Yeesh.

This is seriously what we’re faced with now in the debate over Health Care Reform. One badly designed, government-bestowed oligarchy is to be cut to help pass the law constructing a much larger, meaner, even more evil government-bestowed oligarchy.

I mean, seriously. I hate Sallie Mae as much as the next college student, but they don’t kill 45,000 people a year, like the semi-privatized healthcare system does in America.

When you think about it, the current student loan mess is far more liberal than the Obama plan for health care. Really; the federal government does a lot of direct lending. In effect, they already act as a public option in the student lending market.

Yet it hasn’t been enough; private companies still gouge students and the government simultaneously, and the price of education has slipped further out of the reach of American students. Something had to be done, and that something was to nationalize the process, saving a buttload of money. (Which I wholeheartedly support)

However, I can’t help but wonder why it’s ok to stick a shiv in one group of usurious private sector parasites, while cozying up to a much larger and more vicious group at the same time.

I was reading The Rude Pundit today and he had a link up to a Mother Jones editorial about the rise of right wing extremist groups. The editorial discusses, in a fairly long-winded way, the fact that extremist groups want to operate outside the American system, overturning governments they dislike through violence and force of arms, rather than elections. They tie this into Richard Hofstadter, the Paranoid Style, what have you – you’ve probably heard this song before.

“The paranoid spokesman,” Hofstadter wrote, “is always manning the barricades of civilization…Like religious millennialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse…He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised…Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.”

The interesting part comes when they try to tie the extremist actors in the right wing to first the Republicans in Congress, and then.. well, me. (Us?)

If this were all just so much blowhardery—designed merely to drive ratings and bait liberal bloggers—it would be slightly tawdry but perfectly ordinary political theater for the groundlings. But what may have started as tactical rhetoric has become a philosophy of governing. As MoJo blogger Kevin Drum has put it, the congressional minority’s guiding principle is now “What part of NO! don’t you understand?”

This is the true danger of condoning rhetoric like Oath Keepers’: It’s not just that it might push some from the paranoid fringe to the terrorist fringe. It’s that the political debate becomes corroded to the point where we as a nation no longer have enough common ground to agree to disagree. When one side’s goal is to stonewall and destroy rather than discuss and engage, we get paralysis—it takes two to tango, but only one to stonewall. (And stonewall-and-destroy is by no means a strategy unique to Republicans—yes, kill-the-health-care-bill lefties, that means you.) There are many ways to attack democracy, and one of them is to slowly, cynically undermine the founders’ mandate: to work together toward a more perfect union.

In the original, ‘kill-the-health-care-bill lefties’ links to Jane’s Huffpo piece listing ten reasons to oppose a specific piece of legislation. Which is somehow akin to bringing down a government through unreasoning fanaticism. (They might have noticed that Jane’s call was specific to the Senate health bill, not the House’s version or healthcare reform in general, but that subtle point slipped past their keen editorial radar somehow. Reading comprehension’s not what it used to be)

Aside from convincing me to never purchase another copy of Mother Jones, I don’t find this editor’s note very persuasive, but let’s see if we can follow their logic:

1) Extremist right-wing groups exhibit Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style, characterized by a fanatical, uncompromising stance that views one’s enemies as pure evil and all political conflicts as fights to the death between good and evil.

2) Republicans in Congress have translated this into a political strategy, using obstructionism to try and bring down the government rather than allow any of their evil enemy’s policies to take effect.

3) Progressives who oppose a specific piece of legislation are just the same as Republicans in Congress, because they don’t agree with President Obama on absolutely everything ever. Oh, and they’re subversives undermining the country, attacking democracy and betraying the Founders.

Hmm. What was that definition of the Paranoid Style again?

Because it sounds a lot like the editors at Mother Jones.