Yet Another Reason Why Friends Really Don't Let Friends Support the Republican Party

Paul Krugman

The War on Logic: My wife and I were thinking of going out for an inexpensive dinner tonight. But John Boehner, the speaker of the House, says that no matter how cheap the meal may seem, it will cost thousands of dollars once you take our monthly mortgage payments into account. Wait a minute, you may say. How can our mortgage payments be a cost of going out to eat, when we’ll have to make the same payments even if we stay home? But Mr. Boehner is adamant: our mortgage is part of the cost of our meal, and to say otherwise is just a budget gimmick.

O.K., the speaker hasn’t actually weighed in on our plans for the evening. But he and his G.O.P. colleagues have lately been making exactly the nonsensical argument I’ve just described — not about tonight’s dinner, but about health care reform. And the nonsense wasn’t a slip of the tongue; it’s the official party position, laid out in charts and figures.

We are, I believe, witnessing something new in American politics. Last year, looking at claims that we can cut taxes, avoid cuts to any popular program and still balance the budget, I observed that Republicans seemed to have lost interest in the war on terror and shifted focus to the war on arithmetic. But now the G.O.P. has moved on to an even bigger project: the war on logic....

Republicans have a small problem: they claim to care about budget deficits, yet the Congressional Budget Office says that repealing last year’s health reform would increase the deficit. So what, other than dismissing the nonpartisan budget office’s verdict as “their opinion” — as Mr. Boehner has — can the G.O.P. do?... First of all, says the analysis, the true cost of reform includes the cost of the “doc fix.”... Well, in 1997 Congress enacted a formula to determine Medicare payments to physicians. The formula was, however, flawed; it would lead to payments so low that doctors would stop accepting Medicare patients. Instead of changing the formula, however, Congress has consistently enacted one-year fixes. And Republicans claim that the estimated cost of future fixes, $208 billion over the next 10 years, should be considered a cost of health care reform. But the same spending would still be necessary if we were to undo reform. So the G.O.P. argument here is exactly like claiming that my mortgage payments, which I’ll have to make no matter what we do tonight, are a cost of going out for dinner.

There’s more like that: the G.O.P. also claims that $115 billion of other health care spending should be charged to health reform....

To be sure, the Republican analysis doesn’t rely entirely on spurious attributions of cost — it also relies on using three-card monte tricks to make money disappear. Health reform, says the budget office, will increase Social Security revenues and reduce Medicare costs. But the G.O.P. analysis says that these sums don’t count....

The key to understanding the G.O.P. analysis of health reform is that the party’s leaders are not, in fact, opposed to reform because they believe it will increase the deficit. Nor are they opposed because they seriously believe that it will be “job-killing” (which it won’t be). They’re against reform because it would cover the uninsured.... [T]he modern G.O.P. has been taken over by an ideology in which the suffering of the unfortunate isn’t a proper concern of government, and alleviating that suffering at taxpayer expense is immoral...

I think he is wrong. I think some people believe that it is immoral for poor people to receive government-funded health care. (For example, consider the line that distributive justice is that people deserve to keep whatever they earn without cheating. That would imply that (a) if you don't earn enough to pay for your health care, and (b) if market failures prevent you from buying insurance ex ante at a reasonable price, and (c) if you cannot convince anyone rich to voluntarily cover your charity care--then (d) tough: it's moral for you to die untreated.)

But rather more, I think, are opposed to implementing the Affordable Care Act--the nationwide RomneyCare plan originally proposed by the Republican Heritage Foundation--because if it is implemented the press will write about it as a victory for Obama and the Democrats.

If only the press had written about the Affordable Care Act as a victory for moderate Republicanism, there would be no more enthusiastic cheerleader for its implementation that John Boehner,