The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait has found another loophole, he calls The NRA Health Care Loophole, and notes:
A huge portion of the conservative backlash against health care reform was premised on the notion that reform would force people who choose to lead healthy, responsible lives to subsidize bad decisions by fat, lazy slobs.
Chait then goes on to point out the exemption in the Health Care bill that prohibits insurers from charging extra for gun ownership, and demands we be outraged. I hate to light fire to your straw man there Jon, but I don’t think that’s the argument we’ve made. I believe the argument we’ve made is that it gives government a very appealing reason to control the behavior of citizenry, either by hook or by crook, because of the costs imposed on public health. In other words, it opens up the door to Food Control, Gun Control, bans on risky lifestyle decisions — or at best a sort of quiet tyranny by manipulation of the system to coerce people to make better (by their definition) choices. In other words, we’re afraid of exactly what Jonathan Chait wants us to be outraged by.
Can we go after the Swimming Pool Lobby for “carving out an exception in the health care bill” because far more children drown in backyard pools than are killed by firearms inside the home?
And, predictably, Chait uses discredited anti-gun advocacy science to suggest that guns in the home constitute an actuarially significant risk to health.
There’s a saying to the effect of, “Don’t interrupt your enemy when he is about to make a big mistake.”
If the Dems want to run on a platform of “the GOP isn’t hateful enough toward the 100 million gun owners”–let them.