It’s time to repeal the ARA: the Ayn Rand Act
We’ve all heard of the predilections avowed by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R). He loves the words and philosophies of Ayn Rand.
His big act of implementing these philosophies is now unfolding as Ryan leads a Congress making aggressive moves to repeal the Affordable Care Act (ACA). There are no documented plans for replacing health care accessibility for more than 20 million Americans affected by this proposed repeal.
But selfish ideology is the fashion of the day. So it proceeds.
Slapfests
You may recall that the term “Obamacare” was slapped on the ACA by Republicans angered that a President should attempt to use government to improve the lives of people living in America. The goal was to paint the Affordable Care Act as a negative by slapping Obama’s name on it and mocking it at every turn. But for perspective, let’s take a quick look at the history of how supposedly insulting terms targeting inventive people have been turned into hallmarks of culture, arts and religion where attempts to malign those who inspired the world to change are quite common.
Lutherans and Protestants
Example number one: The term “Lutheran” was coined as something of an insult toward those who followed the ways of Martin Luther, a Catholic priest who nailed the 95 Theses on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences to the proverbial door of the Catholic Church in protest of the selfishly bad habits (Indulgences!) Catholicism had developed over the centuries. The term Lutheran is now used to describe millions of Christian believers who still claim to follow in his name.
The term Protestant then emerged to describe the overall movement against legalism in the Catholic Church. This renewed brand of Christian faith was more aligned with grace as an access point to God, and yet Protestantism aroused ire from Catholic conservatives of the day. Ultimately the claim of being a Protestant came to be a well-respected brand of Christian belief as well.
Ironically in this day and age, the current Pope Francis seems to align more with Protestant values than his more conservative Catholic peers or their political allies. In many ways, Pope Francis pointedly resists the selfish objectivism rampant in modern culture. This was the same mode of thinking Jesus most ardently opposed in his day as well.
To put a finer point on it, the Pope specifically calls for all people to care for the poor and the disenfranchised. This is, of course, a principle (and scriptural) tenet of the Christian faith. Thus one would think that people who love to claim that America is a “Christian nation” would place helping the poor at the top of governmental priorities. But alas, those who abide (intentionally or not) by the Ayn Rand School of Objectivism in their politics (especially fiscal policy) are some of the same people who claim Christianity as their theology. But when these same people seek to depict poor people as flawed creatures unworthy of social assistance or government support, their belief system feels like a house of cards.
We should instead consider than when Pope Francis was installed, he quickly dispensed with priests and Cardinals using the wealth of the church for their own benefit. The Pope himself has been known to sneak out and help the poor and the afflicted on his nightly walks in Rome.
Oppositional values
In this respect Pope Francis stands in direct opposition to the political belief system expressed by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R), who has consistently advocated slashing federally funded social programs that prop up the poor, the elderly and the sick.
Perhaps Ryan’s roots of faith and his political actions are the result of a highly conflicted personality. He claims to be both a Catholic and yet a devout follower of the philosophies of author Ayn Rand.
We’ve seen the results of deep inner conflicts between faith and political ideology before. Consider the daft contention by one Ronald Reagan who while campaigning for President of the United States of America boldly insisted that “Government is not the solution to our problems. Government is the problem.” Why run for office at all if you believe that the very instrument of your employment is the source of evil? This is the conservative conundrum writ large. And it patently ignores the notion that government exists for the purpose of creating and protecting the common good.
What about the common good?
To put the Reagan and Ryan criticisms of government to the test, we must ask a cogent question. Exactly here in American history has this philosophy that “selfishness is best” actually been proven to serve the common good, much less the nation as a republic?
Key points in American history suggest otherwise. First, people gave their lives in the Revolutionary War to help America establish itself as a nation. This occurred before America even existed. That means every person on the continent had every reason to behave in a selfish manner, catering to the British or concerning themselves only with their own business or self-interests. Instead, they banded together to fight for freedom and usher in the system of democracy and a republican designed to provide for the common good. Our Constitution was written around these same principles, a collection of laws and beliefs composed for the common good.
Then people fought to preserve the Union in the Civil War. This was also done for the common good.
And when World War II erupted, America’s Greatest Generation gave their lives to save democracy in a world genuinely threatened by the Third Reich and Japanese Imperialism. This we did for the common good of all humanity.
During that great war, President Franklin Roosevelt nationalized many industries to assure the cause was won. America truly could not afford to quibble about whether resources were “public” or “private.”
Nor did Roosevelt cave in to theorists who might have wanted to let people starve and die off during the Great Depression. He used government to serve the keen purpose of helping the nation and its people survive through times thick and thin.
But would people such as Paul Ryan have courage to show such conviction to the common good? It is highly doubtful. They would be far more interested in preaching the need for others to pick themselves up by the bootstraps.
And that’s the ugly, dismissive philosophy too many Republicans have foisted on the nation and used to block any initiatives proposed by President Barack Obama to provide for the common good of all Americans.
The Obamacare Legacy
But let us recall some recent history. In 2008, when President Barack Obama stepped into office, the nation was in economic crisis with the Great Recession of 2007. Using federal funds to create stimulus packages designed to bail out financial institutions and rescue the American automotive industry from dissolution, he presided over the long recovery necessary to pull America back from the ideological brink wrought by eight years of selfish objectivism under Republican rule.
In an effort to provide greater access to health insurance for everyday individuals, President Obama then took on the health insurance industry to prevent rising costs from swallowing the American healthcare system as a whole.
But rather than get on board with the idea that America’s health care system and insurance process could be improved, Republicans cynically branded the Affordable Care Act “Obamacare” and worked to paint it with such cynicism that it would turn into a negative in the eyes of the American people.
And yet the Affordable Care Act delivered health insurance access to millions of people that previously did not qualify for coverage due to pre-existing conditions. This was a rousing success. Many millions more were able to gain coverage through subsidies that helped underwrite the cost of premiums. These were also successes.
The plan was not without its flaws. It did come with a cost to the health care system as a whole. But one of the interesting challenges was the fact that the new plan essentially pulled people into coverage whose costs were previously ignored or hidden from view. Millions of people had grown accustomed to showing up in emergency rooms in hopes of getting treatment. But where else did they have to go?
According to the World Health Organization, America’s health care system ranked 37th among developed nations. There was obviously need for improvement and a change in the manner in which healthcare was delivered and how the insurance industry was allowed to control coverage.
The Ayn Rand Act
Health insurance companies were very much in the catbird seat on who they chose to cover before the ACA. The industry was essentially able to block those who stood outside the protection of corporate plans in which giant worker pools and company subsidies covered any risk factors.
Those individuals who tried to gain coverage through the “free-market system” of American health care often found themselves barred from coverage due to pre-existing conditions. Others found the windows for enrollment were opaque, or virtually non-existent. Even for wealthy families and the self-employed, costs for individual private insurance plans were often so high it did not pay to purchase a plan.
The few individual plans that could be purchased on the free market held really high deductibles and imposed forceful maximums. In cases where people got truly sick the cap on such plans resulted in medical bankruptcy or worse, a death sentence when health care benefits ran out.
Penalties for self-initiative
Thus it was individual Americans and small businesspeople that had the most problems getting health care insurance for themselves and their employees. The American insurance system essentially penalizes people for showing personal initiative in working for themselves or starting a small business.
This was the reverse effect of Ayn Rand objectivism, define as: “the proper moral purpose of one’s life is the pursuit of one’s own happiness (rational self-interest), that the only social system consistent with this morality is one that displays full respect for individual rights embodied in laissez-faire capitalism.”
The legislative philosophy supported by Republicans when it came to health care insisted that if existing free-market system did not happen to somehow include you, then something must be wrong with you. Because the free market could never be wrong.
Perverse objectivism
The problem with this philosophy is that the market is frequently, desperately “wrong” about a great many things. When those Robber Barons at the turn of the 20th century monopolized the economy, or when speculative market forces tanked the nation in the Great Depression and the Most Recent Recession, a great number of people get “wronged” and are left to pick up the scraps of their crushed investment portfolios by the greedy self-interests of those who care not a whit about the common good. That’s how American wealth has migrated so boldly to the 1%. They have insulated themselves from all such market forces by fixing the system to their own benefit.
And that seems to be the Republican philosophy about health care insurance. To them it does not seem to matter that so many millions of Americans should be left high and dry in terms of health insurance. Thus their exclusionary policy that happens to cater more to the profits of health insurance companies and Big Pharma could legitimately be branded the Ayn Rand Act. Their supposed concern for the welfare of Americans is nothing more than that: An act.
How the Ayn Rand Act works
Cynically, men such as Paul Ryan have suggested the right thing to do in terms of “health insurance coverage for all” is to throw Americans considered “high risk” candidates to be thrown into an insurance pool with an assigned value of $20B over a ten-year term with caps on how much insurance each individual can use. In other words: When the money in the designated pool runs out for you, that’s all folks. This is nothing more than fearful selfishness and money-grubbing writ large.
Americans are also unlikely to get much sympathy on health care assistance from the unrelentingly selfish President Donald Trump. The man’s disturbing appeals to the American public have their share of Ayn Rand flavor to them, but instead of being built on the hard rock of objectivism they are built almost entirely on the sand of political relativism. Trump have already proven he will say whatever he thinks he needs to say in order to bolster his own ego or defend himself from critics.
But Trump is the perfect ally for the Ayn Rand Act and Republicans who will work to get their own way at all costs. Anything that doesn’t go their way will be blamed on Trump until he is not around anymore. Then they’ll simply install Mike Pence, a Christian authoritarian whose political philosophy is equally dismissive and on par with cold-hearted objectivism.
Ayn Rand would be so happy. Her ugly truths have become a best seller in ways that she possibly never intended. Instead of The Fountainhead, we’re living a perpetual combover and a pack of political misfits with ideological rocks for brains. So perhaps it all came true after all.
The Ayn Rand Act is real. But perhaps it’s time for a repeal.
