My first inclination is to call the Republican vote to repeal health care reform yesterday meaningless, since it’s unlikely to even come up for a vote in the Senate and faces a certain presidential veto even if it did,  but it actually wasn’t meaningless at all. It told us everything we need to know about today’s Republican party. Since they offered no alternative, only a “no” to the current law, the message was loud and clear.

Republicans are in favor of denying coverage to people with pre-existing conditions. Republicans are in favor of Americans going bankrupt because of medical expenses. Republicans are in favor of insurance companies cancelling your policy for any reason, real or imagined, as soon as you get sick. Republicans don’t give a damn about the deficit. Republicans will lie about, distort, and ignore facts and figures that don’t support their positions.

Here it is straight from the horses mouths. Steve King sees the pre-existing conditions provision as a “minor thing”:

“Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) claimed Wednesday that he wasn’t worried about eliminating the popular preexisting conditions provision of the health care bill through the current GOP effort to repeal the law…This is too many pages, it’s too cluttered, it’s too big an argument to allow it to turn on one or two minor things.”

Phil Gingrey brushes aside the HHS report which says that up to 129 million Americans have a pre-existing condition that would deny them coverage, saying that number must include people with “hangnails and fever blisters” and that “if you believe those statistics, I’ve got a beach I can sell you in Pennsylvania.”

Gingrey is only following his leader. Speaker Boehner on the CBO report which says repealing health care will increase the deficit by $230 billion:

“…Boehner told reporters: “I do not believe that repealing the job-killing health care law will increase the deficit.” The budget experts are “entitled to their opinion,” added Boehner.”

The “job-killing” part of the statement is a distortion of another CBO report on whether or not health care reform would lead to job losses. But Republicans have never been ones to let facts get in the way of a good lie, See “death panels” and “pull the plug on Grandma.”

Paul Krugman gets down to the nitty-gritty:

“The key to understanding the GOP 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 — and that’s something they just don’t want to do. And it’s not about the money…the modern GOP 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, never mind how little it costs.”